by Tahir Shah
The manager’s body, with the proportions of a whiskey barrel, was balanced above a pair of child-sized feet. The ratio resulted in awkward, listing movements, like those of a Sumo wrestler in ballet shoes. Buffing his fingernails on his stained teal-green kitchen apron, the night operator filled me in on some of the details of his profession. Topu translated.
He explained that, until the mid-1980s, Calcutta was Asia’s largest exporter of human skeletons. At the height, about fifty thousand human skulls, and more than twenty thousand complete skeletons, were shipped from Calcutta to international buyers every year. Most were exported illegally to Europe via Bangladesh.
But this was just the tip of the bone-business iceberg. Impecunious states like Bihar and Orissa have two things in abundance. The first is live people. The second is dead people.
In 1988 at least seventy thousand human skeletons were smuggled abroad. Many were victims of road accidents. Thousands more were the decomposing corpses of the exhumed.
Doms, scavengers, across India snatch bodies from hospital morgues, newly dug graves, and crematoria. One distraught relative went to the newspapers when he saw a suspicious-looking man skinning heads at his local morgue. The thief, who was stuffing the skulls in a rough wooden box, was no doubt, about to dispatch them to Calcutta for a quick sale.
As he led Venky and me around his factory, the night operator warned us to cover our noses. His sense of smell must have withered years before, scotched by the vicious stench.
The first workshop was the size and shape of an inter-city railway carriage. Its walls were dark with grime and the floor was caked in mud like a pigsty. The room stank of death. Rotting human flesh radiates a rumbustious, chaotic smell. It bombards the full spectrum of the nasal senses like a stink bomb. Humans interpret the odor as irresistibly unpleasant – an instinctual alarm. Curious as to Venky’s reaction to the aroma, I glanced over at him. The muscles of his face had locked, creating a warped, petrified expression.
“Don’t worry,” I gagged through my handkerchief. “Think of it as a scientific exercise.”
The rickshawalla blinked once. The shock had made him mute. A single male corpse was being stripped by a pair of deferential assistants in front of him. The ease with which they handled the cadaver suggested they were not novices to the profession.
Weaned on censored television, the Western world has an erroneous idea of what a cadaver is like. We’re used to seeing clean, well-turned out corpses on marble slabs in low-budget police dramas. The toe-tags are orderly – the corpses lie straight-backed. Five minutes in a West Bengal skeleton factory amends such trim images. Cadavers are bloated with internal gas. Their skin is rotting, falling away from the bone. The limbs are twisted; the fingers gnarled like a bird’s talons. The face is swollen and contorted, with the mouth open and the nose knocked off. The skin itself is devoid of that refined, even tint of oyster gray from police dramas. It’s black with decay; blotched and hemorrhaged, like a gangrenous, suppurating lump of meat.
* * * *
As he led us through to the next chamber, the night operator lamented how difficult it was to get good-quality corpses.
“We get offered so many,” he said whimsically, “but the doms are very greedy. They don’t pay enough attention to the condition of the bones. What good is a corpse which has been mangled in a car crash? How can we export such a thing?”
I grunted once, then again, echoing the manager’s despondency.
“We only deal with perfect cadavers,” he continued. “Before all the restrictions, we would export only the skull if the actual body was damaged. But now we’re much more careful. Fewer skeletons are being sold from Calcutta, and so we make sure they’re in good condition. The hardest thing to get right is the teeth. What scientist would want a nice white skeleton in his office that’s missing its front teeth? Most of the older cadavers have awful teeth; and the young ones tend to have been killed in traffic accidents.”
“So what’s the perfect specimen?” I asked, slipping the handkerchief away for a second to splutter out my question.
The night operator, who seemed to have a genuine fondness for his vocation, smiled.
“Well,” he said, with Topu still translating, “often the best examples are young men who have died of a disease.”
“What kind of disease?” I snapped, fearful of what contagious infections were inhabiting the premises.
“Oh, all types …” the manager said casually. “We get a lot of tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, and venereal diseases. As long as the illness hasn’t corroded or distorted the bones, we consider them. Doms get very angry when they have their corpse refused. But if, say, it’s got polio, rickets, or elephantiasis, how can we accept it?” The night operator paused to shoo away a rat. “Sometimes we get in a nice example,” he continued. “It’s a young man of good size, with good teeth. You think it’ll look really nice when it’s cleaned up. But then, when the flesh has been removed, we see that the bones have been eaten away by syphilis. And it’s us who lose out. We pay the doms before the corpse has been stripped.”
“Syphilis …” intoned Topu somberly. “It’s the curse of the skeleton dealers.”
“How long have the bodies been dead when you get them?”
“It’s often hard to say,” the manager explained. “Sometimes we get them when they’re quite fresh – a week or two old. Other times, they’re much older – months, even years. With the restrictions, it takes doms longer to bring them from other states, like Orissa.”
The official ushered us into the next chamber. Much wider than the last, but with a lower ceiling, the room was filled with a series of dented gray metal troughs. Each contained a dark, pungent liquid.
“The corpses are placed in the acid for a complete day,” said the night operator. “The acid dissolves most of the flesh; but it mustn’t start to work on the bone. If that happens, then the cadaver’s useless. We take care the acid isn’t too strong.”
We paced through into another workshop.
The night operator lit a biri, a hand-rolled Indian cigarette, and carried on outlining the factory’s task.
“After a day in the acid,” he said, “the corpse is pulled out and the workers clean off any flesh which remains. The vertebrae, feet, toes, and joints all need a lot of work. But hardest to prepare is the skull. What’s left of the brain is removed, even the smallest traces of flesh and skin are cleared away. Only very skilled workers clean the skull.”
Four men were squatting on the concrete floor. Without glancing up at us, they continued with their work. A jigsaw puzzle of bones was scattered before them. One, clutching a skull in his hands like an orb, cautiously brushed out the eye sockets. Another was scrubbing individual vertebrae with a toothbrush.
“See what care they take with their jobs!” the night operator exclaimed. “Our workmen like it here very much. Of course, before the ban, we had a much larger staff. We used to export all over the world, bringing a lot of valuable foreign currency into the country.”
Like any other small business executive, wounded by punitive legislation, the manager was bitter.
“After the bones have had the remaining flesh removed,” he said, “they get dipped in a series of other baths. First, a strong acid, and then a bleach solution.”
“What happens then – after the bleaching?”
“Then comes the most time-consuming and skilled part,” intoned the executive. “The bones are checked for damage, then they’re drilled and pinned. Synthetic cartilage is fitted between the vertebrae and in the ribcage. All that is now done at another factory.”
The night operator broke off, disturbed by a falsetto whining similar to the sound of a doodle-bug careering to earth. He, Topu, and I turned in unison. Behind us, trembling in the skull-filled comer, kneeling and rocking back and forth, his hands splayed across his face, was Venky.
* * * *
Back in Alipore, the magician listened with veiled interest to my description
of the night’s sordid observations. Waving general descriptions of the skeleton factory aside, he searched for intricate details. What color was the flesh being scrubbed from the vertebrae? Was the metal of the acid baths corroded at the seams? Had I noticed any stray teeth on the floor?
As before, I bit my tongue when grilled about contacts. Feroze would have been displeased to learn that his own former agent had set up the rendezvous. The Master feigned ignorance of the body business, but he obviously knew all about it. A rummage through his desk drawers had revealed a metacarpus, a human finger bone. Before leaving the factory, I had handed the night operator an outrageously large tip. In return, he offered Venky and me souvenirs of our tour … finger bones.
“You have done well, haven’t you?” said Feroze sarcastically when I had finished.
“Thank you.”
The magician glanced at his watch.
“You can have the rest of the morning off,” he sneered.
It was a quarter to twelve. With a full fifteen minutes to squander, I went out to the kitchen to have a chat with Gokul.
The manservant was standing on a chair, hanging a new fly-paper from the ceiling.
“Your chest not sounding good,” he said as I entered.
“It’s the city’s pollution,” I responded. “I’ve never had asthma until now. Calcutta’s air should carry a health warning.”
“You know …” said Gokul quietly, “someone told me about special cure for asthma. In Hyderabad … Gowd family giving free miracle cures on one day at start of every June.”
“Miracle cure?” I replied. “What is it exactly?”
Gokul hunched his shoulders.
“Don’t know what,” he said. “But I always wanting to go there. I, too, having this asthma.”
Gokul wheezed severely to prove the advanced state of his condition.
“Sounds interesting … I’ll drop by if I ever happen to be in Hyderabad in June.”
As the long-case clock in the sorcerer’s study struck the last chime of noon, I stood to attention beside it.
Feroze peered up from his writing desk. He pointed to a stack of forty or so books, mostly on illusion.
“Have you read those?”
“Yes, all of them. Shall I put them back on the shelf?”
“Have you practiced all the illusions we learned last week?”
“Yes.”
“Did you scrub beneath your nails with bleach after your little foray last night?”
“Yes … twice.”
“All right,” replied the Master, standing on tiptoe for a moment. “Then you’re to come with me.”
Feroze led me into the street, where he hailed a taxi. Although he often slunk out of the house to meet Rublu at the Albert Hall, the magician had rarely invited me to accompany him anywhere.
“Are we going for coffee at the Albert Hall?” I asked optimistically.
The Master did not reply. He was concentrating on other matters.
“Are your shoes waterproof?” he asked at some length.
“Well, not very,” I retorted. “They’re suede. But I suppose they’re no worse than your loafers.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he barked.
The taxi bypassed central Calcutta, heading north-east towards the gridlock traffic of Tangra, the Chinese suburb. Calcutta’s suburbia was until recently patched with lakes; some salty, others freshwater. The pressure for new tenement blocks had spurred on the illicit draining of such entrancing pools. Calcutta’s climate was changing as a result. I asked Feroze what he thought of the destruction. He told me to hush. Other problems occupied his attention.
With gritted teeth, the taxi driver charged through the swarm of vehicles and incessant road-works. Once beyond Tangra, he turned on to a secluded tow-path and proceeded for half an hour. The trail became increasingly jungly and overgrown. Still deep in thought, the Master stared in concentration at his lap.
Five minutes more and the taxi veered sharply to negotiate an unexpected blind turn. As we recovered from the jolt, Feroze tapped the driver’s neck, signaling for him to stop. The brakes were applied with tremendous force, sending the vehicle into a prolonged skid.
“Come with me,” instructed Feroze sternly. “Welcome to East Calcutta Marshes.”
We marched down to the water, where a ramshackle launch was waiting. The boat’s owner helped us into the craft. The magician barked a set of instructions at him. Nodding, the man pushed the boat away from the bank. Very soon we were playing forward into the swampland ahead.
Every day about a third of Calcutta’s sewage seeps directly into the wetlands. With a little hard work and a lot of help from nature, the slurry is broken down. When the toxins are no more, fish and vegetables thrive.
The marshes lie due east from the rank-smelling tanneries of Chinatown and the mountainous refuse heaps of Dhapa. More than twenty-three million liters of sewage and industrial waste flow into them every day. Despite this, they provide hundreds of tonnes of food in return.
Part of the secret lies in the efficiency of the city’s rag-pickers. They sift out every morsel of reusable material – from scraps of metal and food to fragments of cloth, glass, and plastic. The rest of the secret lies in the marshes’ extraordinary plant life. The water hyacinth filters out the heavy metals, including mercury; while yet more plants strain out the oil, grease, and toxins. Cast an eye across the wetlands, and you see dozens of miniature rice paddies and vegetable plots poking above the reeds and tall grasses.
Politicians are eager to drain the marshes to provide yet more cheap housing for the masses. To them, an ecological recycling plant is of no use. Instead of a twenty-thousand-acre botanical paradise, their vision is of tenements for all the voters.
Feroze had no interest in discussing the marshes’ ecological web of life. Something was bothering him. When I quizzed him on where we were going in the leaking craft, he told me to shut up.
Only when I drifted off to sleep did he address me. “Godmen are having a field day in India!” he shouted.
“But they’re nothing new … they've been around for thousands of years.”
“That might be true,” the Master responded, “but they’re developing now like never before … they’re changing. And as they change, they’re increasing their power over every hamlet, village, town and city. Soon the whole country w ill be at their mercy!”
Sensationalism was not something which Feroze generally went in for. I suspected that, about to launch into one of his fearsome diatribes, he had a point to make.
“But you yourself have taught magical feats to godmen,” I said.
The Master looked out across the marshes. He sniffed the air like a spaniel.
“That may be so,” he replied. “I’m not condemning the rise of the godmen, but merely making an observation. Today in India there are about five thousand leading godmen. That’s five thousand deities in human form. The most celebrated attract hundreds of thousands as their followers … from peasants in the rice paddies to the Prime Minister.”
“You are against them?”
“Absolutely not,” intoned the Master. “I’ve known many of them most of their working careers. I taught illusions to dozens of them. Do you think they came up with those ‘miracles’ all on their own? Miracles are easy … you know that. But they’re not everything.”
“Then what’s the key?”
Feroze pressed his hand to his mouth.
“Presentation,” he said. “Spew out three hours of ‘wooly’ talk – preach about kundalini, self-purification, the cosmic soul or karmic forces – and you’ll keep your followers. Remember, the illusions are the flame which attracts the moth – the rest is down to the gift of the gab.” “What about all the Westerners who come here looking for a guru?”
Feroze shook his head.
“All those foreigners,” he said, “are looking for something quite different than the Indians. Both have contrasting demands on their gurus. Indian people – espe
cially those in villages and small towns – are looking for a cure for illness and increased prosperity. Guru means ‘dispeller of darkness’, but that’s not what the Westerners are after. They’re looking for someone to praise them – to reinforce their self-confidence.”
The oarsman stood up and started to bail water from the center of the craft. Although relatively stable, we were sitting in eight inches of water. My suede brogues were ruined. I looked over to see how Feroze’s slip-ons were faring. He had somehow managed to change shoes en route. Instead of loafers, he was now kitted out in a sturdy pair of Gore-Tex hiking boots.
“Don’t forget,” he said after a minute of thought, “that illusion and magic are taken far more seriously in India than in the West. I’ve told you this before. The faddish superstition of Elizabethan Europe is a feature of modern-day India. Conjury is used by godmen, healers, priests, sadhus, and many others. All of them are seeking to create an impact. The metaphysical is a key facet to life here … Indians explain the natural through the supernatural.”
As Feroze ranted on about illusion, the boat’s pilot docked on a sandbank. Stepping out on to the beach, the Master’s thoughts returned to the situation at hand.
“Can’t you tell me where we’re going?” I moaned, as we tramped a mile east over mud flats.
“Wait and see.”
The earth was moist, and thick with a thorny form of reed. They snagged on my pants as I struggled to keep up. Every shade of green was represented there. I called out to Feroze, asking what he thought of the colors. But as always uninterested in my observations, he ordered me to hurry.
“We don’t have much time,” he said, glancing at his pocket-watch. “The assembly’s about to start.”
“What assembly? What’s this all about?”
As yet another question went unanswered; we arrived at the outskirts of a sprawling village. Feroze led the way to the central square. He seemed to know the layout of the village well.
