The Red Market (5 page)

The room, a circus a minute ago, is now as silent as a tomb. I have nothing to do but resume my vigil. Mishra offers me a smile and a shrug and goes back to his post outside. Alone again with Emily’s corpse, a new reality begins to settle in. Not only has a student of mine died tragically in one of the remotest areas of India, but now I need to get her body back home. Six hours after her death, very little separates the empty husk she left behind from a poorly packaged slab of meat. And with the temperature threatening to reach 100 degrees by noon, there isn’t much time to halt the process of decay.

At the front desk of the hospital the nurse in the Florence Nightingale uniform tells me that the hospital doesn’t have an ice machine. What’s more, I can’t even take possession of her body until after a government-mandated autopsy. She suggests that I sit with the body until the doctors arrive.

I wait.

Eventually a small ambulance that is the same make and model of the van that the journalists used pulls up outside the ward. The only difference between the vehicles is that the rear seats of this one have been removed in favor of a rack for a gurney. Two men wearing rumpled button-down business shirts and threadbare slacks say that they have come to take the body for an autopsy.

They drop her into the back of the van with a dull thump and drive half a mile down the dirt road. I sit with the body in the back as they forge their way across campus and finally pull up outside a small, dilapidated, government building with gaping holes in its aluminum roof. A sign on its door in Hindi reads
POSTMORTEM CLASSROOM
. The room looks like it hasn’t been used in a decade. There are several rows of seats on elevated platforms, presumably so students can get a better view of the dissection. Some of the chairs in the middle rows have been upended, and the space is covered in dust and pigeon droppings. At the front of the class are a slate chalkboard and a massive obsidian table that is cool to the touch. They drop Emily’s corpse on the table and padlock the door.

“The doctors will be here soon,” they say before retreating behind a corner to smoke small hand-rolled cigarettes. I notice discarded clothing and several large clumps of hair outside the building—apparently scraps left over from previous autopsies.

When they’re done with their
beedies,
one of them brings me to a nearby building, this one much larger than the postmortem classroom. Here, they say, the superintendent of the medical college will be waiting to meet me. When I arrive Dr. Das is wringing his hands over an impressive amount of paperwork and his jet-black toupee is slightly off-kilter.

The doctor works double duty running the daily affairs of the college and conducting autopsies for the police. When classes are in session he teaches incoming medical students the ins and outs of forensic analysis. That sometimes means reenacting wounds on the unclaimed corpses that come through his morgue. It’s a popular course. And it explains why there are four cabinets full of deadly poisons as well as potential murder weapons, running the gamut from swords, daggers, and machetes to screwdrivers and cricket bats with nails driven through them. Resting on the bottom shelf of the cabinet is a sheaf of crime-scene photos with dead bodies in different stages of decay. As we speak he occasionally gazes at a medical skeleton hanging in the window.

“This is a very special case,” he begins. “Not many foreigners die in this city, so we have to be very careful with how we proceed. Many people are watching.”

As a student, Emily was just one of a handful of young American women in Indian dress perusing holy sites on a spiritual journey. Dead, she is a burgeoning international incident echoing through police bureaucracies, embassy corridors, and insurance companies charged with doling out tens of thousands of dollars to repatriate her remains.

And everything, I learn, hinges on Dr. Das’s report of her death. If he determines that the injuries on her body indicate a possible murder, bureaucratic rules dictate that Emily’s body may have to remain in police custody until the investigation is complete. However, since his medical school has no facilities to preserve a body for more than a few days, keeping her here will mean that she will decompose to a point where the airlines will refuse to airlift her body out of the country.

On the other hand, if he reports that her death is a suicide, the police case can close quickly. But her family, he explains, which by now must know about her death, is Catholic and will not accept that she took her own life only to burn in hell for all of eternity. In fact, they may demand an extra investigation to prove some other cause of death. He’s shaking his head slowly.

“You see, it is a dilemma,” he says, concerned. “It would have been easier had she not died at all.”

There is an imperceptibly thin line that separates live flesh from dead. And the problem with dying is that once that line has been crossed all the rules around how we deal with a person’s physical presence change. Dr. Das sighs and looks across the room to an attendant holding two empty mason jars.

“Perhaps it is time that we begin.” He pushes his palms against his desk and lifts himself heavily. Grabbing a black medical bag, he goes into the hallway, leaving me alone with the cabinets full of medical curiosities.

I don’t follow him. Instead I look at the cricket bat with a rusty nail hammered through the end hanging inside one of his gruesome bookcases. The nail’s tip is bent and a ring of crusted blood sticks lightly to the wood. I shudder to think about the wound that Dr. Das inflicted on an unclaimed corpse. Then, as if I had forgotten it was there at all, my phone begins to vibrate in my pocket.

At the other end of the line, half a world away through a sea of buzzes and crackles, comes the voice of the program’s director in New York. “Scott? I have a favor to ask.”

TWO DAYS LATER
, A low orange sun surfaces lazily above the Gangetic Plain and begins its slow ascent across the sky. It’s early, but I didn’t sleep. My eyes are rimmed red with exhaustion. I spent two days searching the city for a reliable source of ice to keep Emily’s body cool. With the help of the monastery, I dropped hundreds of pounds of ice into her coffin, which we had made at a woodshop. I made every effort to avoid seeing her body when I did so. Together we have moved the body two more times: from the postmortem chamber back to the monastery, and finally to a small morgue that hospital administrators had neglected to mention existed when this all began.

Forensic experts in the United States don’t trust their Indian counterparts, so my boss in New York asked me to take pictures of Emily’s corpse to send back for independent analysis. I’m holding a digital camera that I borrowed from a student. Though she has already had an autopsy here, results are never certain. Without taking pictures I’ve been told that the family may raise an objection, and the body might never leave India.

A police jeep picks me up at my hotel and I drive to the medical college. I’m sitting next to a police officer armed with a submachine gun. His head tilts backward and his eyes flutter between sleep and wakefulness. He doesn’t seem to notice that the barrel is pointed right at my abdomen again. I’ve been here before, I think to myself. A half hour later the cop is still sleeping when we arrive at the postmortem classroom. It’s padlocked shut, and a grizzled attendant wrestles with the keys; his fingers seem to shake uncontrollably. He suggests that a hundred rupees would steady his hand.

I try to brace myself. I expect to be repulsed. The prospect of seeing her postautopsied corpse scares me. A dead body is one thing, but looking at someone after they have been processed by surgeons makes me wonder if they have taken out more than just her organs—whether something more vital might be missing. Bile churns in my stomach.

A minute later, I’m inside and staring at her laid out on a metal gurney.

The doctors have split her down the middle with crude tools—opening her wide from the base of her neck to her pelvis. They broke her ribs to see her heart. To access her brain the doctors sawed a lateral gash through her forehead and skull. They peeled the skin of her face back onto itself. Her forehead was folded over her eyes and the scalp pulled backward. As expected, they saw blood pooled inside her skull. The pressure of that blood against her brain was enough to kill her.

But the surgeons didn’t stop there. They cut out pieces of her liver, brain, heart, and kidney to rule out poisoning. To determine if she had been raped, they removed portions of her vagina, cervix, and fallopian tubes. They gathered all the organs together into three large mason jars and marked them “viscera.” A courier then took the jars to a laboratory three hundred kilometers away. They stitched her up with broad, inelegant sutures.

The findings were as brutal as the procedure. The official cause of death listed in the autopsy report read: “Shock and hemorrhage due to head injury. The injuries simulate a fall from height.”

I don’t feel the way I had anticipated. A different, and perhaps more disturbing, emotion creeps up my stomach and flushes my cheeks.

I’m embarrassed.

Her injuries don’t disturb me. I’m more prepared for those than I had thought. It’s her nakedness that fills me with regret.

Alive, Emily was a beautiful twenty-one-year-old woman in the prime of her life. She could make other girls jealous with her grace, athletic frame, and poise without even knowing it. Having studied yoga for years, her body was at the peak of physical health, with toned muscles and flawless skin. The Emily I knew was strong and in control of her own surroundings.

But here, naked and dead, I know more about Emily than I ever wanted to. When she slides out of the machine, both the attendant and I share an intimate view that would only have been the domain of her lovers. The smell of her viscera, mixed with some preserving agent, is almost palpable in the air; the transgression of her legs, hips, breasts, and stomach seems like it should be forbidden. But the dead don’t have secrets. Emily’s privacy evaporated the moment she stopped breathing. She crossed over to another world where the laws and customs that govern her are different from what they were a week ago. In this world, her parents need photos of their naked daughter. Here she doesn’t flinch when men study, identify, and puzzle over her insides. Whether we acknowledge it or not, our most intimate relationship in life is the one we have with our own bodies. The final indignity of death is losing that control.

The shell of her body is less than the body she was born and grew up with. The injuries damaged her frame, but the far more aggressive harvesting by the college’s pathologists has carved her to pieces and then sent those pieces across the state. This is the body that we will tell stories about and that her parents will weep over. But to call what is left of her “Emily,” or even “Emily’s body,” is a lie. Whatever this is, it is incomplete and will never be whole again.

There is a strange transmutation that we play on the dead. Here on this table, her skin is a bag, the valuable bits already removed, the brisk sutures zipping up her empty cavity. In death she is an object to be parceled and given out to any stakeholder who lays a claim, from the reporters who sold her image to the networks, to the doctors who cut her, to the parents who want to claim her whole. Now I am part of that chain, too: a collector and storyteller for (of?) the dead. Emily, whoever she was, is lost; these are just her parts. It is the same story for everybody. Every body.

I check the light meter and set the camera to harvest. The shutter slams against the frame as I snap pictures in rapid succession: starting at her toes I cover every inch of her until I reach the gash on her forehead. In a little under an hour she will be on a plane to Delhi. From there her body will travel to Louisiana, where she will be buried wearing a light-blue sari that her parents will buy specially for her interment. An attendant comes in to pick up her corpse and load it into a waiting van. I know that part of me will never leave this room.

The only way to preserve Emily’s body after she died in Bodh Gaya in March 2006 was to pack her coffin in ice and then fly the corpse to Delhi. This photo was taken upon the flight’s arrival in Delhi.

This cache of bones was confiscated from the banks of a river and now sits in a dilapidated evidence locker in Purbasthali, West Bengal, India. The bones had been stolen from grave sites by a group of skeleton traders who sell the remains to American anatomical supply companies. The Indian parliament criminalized the trade in human bones in 1985, but people still make money on human remains. The more than one hundred skulls in this seizure would be worth more than $70,000 on the American market.

A
CONSTABLE IN
a sweat-stained undershirt and checkered blue sarong jerks open the back door of a decrepit Indian-made Tata Sumo SUV—what passes for an evidence locker at this rustic police outpost in the Indian state of West Bengal. A hundred human skulls tumble out onto a ragged cloth covering a patch of mud, making a hollow clatter as they fall to the ground. They’ve lost most of their teeth bouncing around in the back of the truck. Bits of bone and enamel scatter like snowflakes around the growing pile.

Standing next to the truck, the ranking officer smiles, clasps his hands over his bulging belly, and lets out a satisfied grunt. “Now you can see how big the bone business is here,” he says. I crouch down and pick up a skull. It’s lighter than I expected. I hold it up to my nose. It smells like fried chicken.

Before the authorities intercepted it, this cache was moving along a well-established pipeline for human skeletal remains. For 150 years, India’s bone trade has followed a route from remote Indian villages to the world’s most distinguished medical schools. The tentacles of the network stretch across the state and into neighboring countries. I’d seen similar caches on the border of Bhutan that were destined for a different market, but these are the real thing: meticulously prepared medical specimens.

Skeletons aren’t easy to get. In the United States, for instance, most corpses receive a prompt burial or cremation. Bodies donated to science usually end up on the dissection table or their bones sawed to pieces. Sometimes they’re sucked into the more profitable industry of medical grafts. So most complete skeletons used for medical study come from overseas. Often they arrive without the informed consent of their former owners and in violation of the laws of their country of origin.

For almost two hundred years India has been the world’s primary source of bones used in medical study, renowned for producing specimens scrubbed to a pristine white patina and fitted with high-quality connecting hardware. In 1985, however, the Indian government outlawed the export of human remains, and the global supply of skeletons collapsed. Western countries turned to China and Eastern Europe, but those regions export relatively few skeletons. They have little experience producing display-quality specimens, and their products are regarded as inferior.

Now, more than two decades after India’s export ban, there are open signs that the trade never ended. Red-market vendors in West Bengal continue to supply human skeletons and skulls using the time-honored method: rob graves, separate soft flesh from unyielding calcium, and deliver the bones to distributors—who assemble them and ship them to dealers around the globe.

Exports to North America are small compared with pre-ban levels, but that just means that it costs more for skeletons—not that they are impossible to come by. Suppliers have ample incentive—it’s a lucrative business. The skulls on the ground before me, for instance, would fetch an estimated $70,000 overseas.

The constable grabs the cloth by its corners and gathers the evidence into a bundle. “You know, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says. “I hope I don’t again.”

A DAY LATER, A
massive low-pressure system over the Bay of Bengal is threatening to flood the eastern armpit of India, the state of West Bengal. Newspapers have already dubbed the storm a “watery apocalypse” after eight people drowned in floods before it even touched land. I’m driving to the tiny village of Purbasthali—about eighty miles outside of Kolkata, the state capital, which was renamed from Calcutta in 2001. The village is the site of the processing plant where the police discovered their load of skulls. My rented Toyota Qualis gets stuck in the mud half a mile from the facility, so I jump out to make my way on foot. The sky is pitch-black, the rain suffocating. Toads the size of boxing gloves hop across the muddy track.

When police arrived to investigate in early 2007, they could smell the stench of rotting flesh from nearly a mile away. Sections of spine strung together with twine dangled from the rafters, an officer told me. Hundreds of bones were scattered on the floor in some sort of ordering system.

This bone factory had been operating for more than one hundred years when two of its workers, drinking at a bar, bragged that they were hired to dig bodies out of graves. Shocked villagers dragged them to a police station, where they confessed. The workers said a man named Mukti Biswas ran the factory. The authorities knew him well. In 2006 police had arrested Biswas as the kingpin of a grave-robbing ring; he was released a day later, news reports said, “because of his political links.” The police took him into custody once again, but, in accordance with precedent, he was let out on bail and has since taken flight.

AFTER TEN MINUTES
of slogging through the mud, I make out the flicker of a gas lamp. I peek into the doorway of a wood-framed house. A family of four sitting on the dirt floor stares back at me.

“Do you know Mukti Biswas?” I ask.

“The bastard still owes me money,” replies Manoj Pal, a twenty-something man with a thin mustache. His family has been working at the bone factory for generations—just as long as Biswas has owned it—he says. He offers to show me around, and we head out along the bank of the Bhagirathi River.

The processing plant is little more than a bamboo hut with a tarpaulin roof—one of more than a dozen bone factories Pal says he knows about. In April the authorities confiscated piles of bones, buckets of hydrochloric acid, and two barrels full of a caustic chemical they have yet to identify. All that’s left is a dirt floor with a large concrete vat sunk into the ground.

A third-generation bone trader, Biswas had no problem finding dead bodies. As caretaker of the village’s cremation ground, he claimed to have a license to dispose of the dead. But police told reporters that he was robbing graves instead. Biswas pilfered corpses from cemeteries, morgues, and funeral pyres; he would drag the deceased from the flames as soon as the families left. He employed almost a dozen people to shepherd the bones through the various stages of defleshing and curing. For this work, Pal says he earned $1.25 a day. He also received a bonus for keeping the bones from a given body together so they represented a biological individual rather than a mishmash of parts—a feature prized by doctors.

Pal explains the factory’s production process. First the corpses are wrapped in netting and anchored in the river, where bacteria and fish reduce them to loose piles of bones and mush in a week or so. The crew then scrubs the bones and boils them in a cauldron of water and caustic soda to dissolve any remaining flesh. That leaves the calcium surfaces with a yellow tint. To bring them up to medical white, bones are then left in sunlight for a week before being soaked in hydrochloric acid.

Biswas had customers across Kolkata. Many skeletons made their way to the grisly wards of the anatomy department at Calcutta Medical College, where local Doms, a traditional grave-tending caste, would pay him in cash. The skeletons are required materials for the hundreds of local medical students who graduate every year. But he also sold complete skeletons wholesale for $45 to a medical supply company called Young Brothers, which wired the pieces together, painted on medical diagrams, and sawed away sections of the skulls to reveal their internal structures. Then Young Brothers sold the bones to dealers around the world.
⁵

Shining my flashlight on the floor, I pick up a wet rag. The translator lets out a low hiss. “I hope you know that’s a death shroud,” he says. I drop the cloth and wipe my hand on my shirt.

I’d been pursuing Mukti Biswas through a cell phone number I took from a local reporter for a week and a half before I actually made contact. Over the crackling connection he says that the police have chosen to banish him rather than prosecute his case. The only way he will meet me is with their permission and, preferably, with the local superintendent in the room. To do otherwise could make the cops reconsider their leniency.

I wait for him as rain pounds on the clay roof tiles of the Purbasthali police outpost while the cop in charge offers me endless cups of tea. Out the window I can see the chemicals that the bone factory used to process skeletons sitting in a couple of metal drums. Eventually the round beams of a British-era ambassador car slice through the darkness, and a chubby young man in his twenties opens the door and dashes for the station’s entrance. It isn’t him. Mukti has decided to stay in hiding. He has sent his son instead.

“This was no secret. It’s been a family business for as long as I can remember,” he says in his father’s defense. He explains that someone has to run the burning ghats or there will be no way to dispose of the dead.

What about robbing graves? “I don’t know anything about that,” he replies.

VICTIMS, HOWEVER, ARE NOT
hard to find.

Mohammed Mullah Box, a gaunt man in his seventies, is the caretaker of a small burial ground in the village of Harbati. When the dead go missing, he’s the first person that grieving relatives come to for answers. Today he doesn’t have any answers or bodies. As he sits on the edge of an empty grave, a tear rolls down from one of his wrinkled eyes and spills onto his cheek.

A few weeks ago, robbers sneaked into the graveyard and exhumed the remains of one of his neighbors shortly after the body had been buried. By now, the skeleton is probably hanging in a Kolkata warehouse, ready to be shipped out to a dealer in the Western world.

I ask Box whether he fears what might happen to his own body when he dies.

“Of course,” he says.

THE EMPIRICAL STUDY OF
human anatomy took off with Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches in the fifteenth century; the earliest known articulated skeleton dates from 1543. As medicine advanced, physicians were expected to have a systematic understanding of the human body’s inner workings. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Europe’s demand for human remains far outstripped the supply.

In England, home of many of the world’s preeminent medical institutions, grave robbing became so commonplace that certain cemeteries were famous for battles between grieving families and marauding medical students. But the situation was perhaps even direr in the United States, where the medical industry was expanding at a faster rate than the population. In 1760 there were five medical schools in all of America. Just one hundred years later the total boomed to sixty-five. Early Americans suffered from a broad range of diseases that gave medical institutions brisk business. The moneymaking opportunities meant that becoming a doctor could be a test case for the American dream. There was no class bar to opening a medical practice; all that was necessary to become a doctor was a solid education and determined hard work.

Throughout the 1800s, medical schools saw incoming classes with freshmen eager to get their hands dirty. But corpses—raw materials for study—were scarce. The historian Michael Sappol notes in
A Traffic in Dead Bodies,
his landmark tome on nineteenth-century resurrectionists, as grave robbers were known, that anatomy rooms were sites of camaraderie where doctors forged their identity as medical professionals. They learned and bonded in the labs as they reduced stolen dead bodies to component pieces. The budding doctors enjoyed lively gallows humor: numerous reports describe doctors posing dramatically with corpses and waving severed limbs out medical school windows at perplexed and distraught pedestrians.

Body snatching itself was a rite of passage. In 1851 the
Boston Medical & Surgical Journal
devoted twenty-one pages, almost its entire issue, to the career of Dr. Charles Knowlton. In that tract the author praised skulduggery, writing, “the risk of exhumation is to them trifling, when compared to the advantages of a labored investigation of the human frame by the dissection knife. Their thirst for the acquisition of knowledge is as ardent and craving as the appetite of a drunkard. It is to such spirits as these that our profession owes its elevated rank.”
⁶

Grave robbing didn’t go down well with the community at large, so doctors followed basic rules to keep complaints to a minimum. Except in rare cases corpses were not typically stolen from upper-class or primarily white graveyards. Where possible, they dissected black—or in a pinch, Irish—corpses, the lowest rungs on the American social ladder. In part that was a practical response to changing American and European funerary traditions that made dying a high-security event. Body snatching was so commonplace that wealthy graveyards posted sentries, raised formidable walls, and dug deeper trenches than the graveyards of the poor. Funeral parlors sold heavy concrete monuments to placed above caskets in order to impede digging. Some funeral homes even offered anti–body snatching alarms that triggered when a robber’s shovel breeched the burial vault.