The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 Read Online Free PDF Page B

lodged a complaint, the Anti-Extortion Cell of the Mumbai police arrested two men suspected of issuing threats on Shakeel's behalf.
    The level of official incompetence and corruption in Kumar's case is too outrageous to believe. Since his wealth made him a target for income tax authorities, the government dispatched tax investigators to study his accounts in August 2006. They ignored the fact that the hospital was unlicensed and that it was a venue for illegal transplants. Instead, flabbergasted that Kumar had been paying no taxes for years, the Indian tax department sent him a notice that legal action would follow. Kumar promptly sent the tax department four checks totaling $1.4 million, but when the department tried cashing the checks, they bounced. In a further blow, Delhi police apprehended one of Kumar's accomplices in January 2008. Kumar reportedly paid a bribe of about $40,000 to a group of police officers in exchange for the man's release.
    Kumar's luck turned on January 24, 2008, when a constable in Moradabad, a town near Meerut, witnessed a fight between Gyasuddin, the middleman, and a donor named Vidya Prakash; Prakash charged that Gyasuddin had stolen his kidney. The two were taken to the nearby police station, where Gyasuddin directed police to the hospital and guesthouse, resulting in raids and, ultimately, Kumar's arrest.
    I went to Meerut to see Prakash, the man who brought down the ring. To get to his house, I walked through a quiet alley where barefoot children played cricket with a muddy tennis ball and a woman in a burqa emerged to dump vegetable peels and eggshells into the street. I zigzagged through lanes that got progressively narrower, passing a dimly lit lathe shop, to finally arrive at a cluster of houses attached to one another like calcifications on a bone.
    There, in a two-story structure, I found the Prakash home. Vidya once made a living repairing analog fare meters for auto-rickshaws. When digital meters came on line, he fell on hard times, he said, and had to sell his blood just to eat. One day he came down with a fever, and a local blood broker turned kidney hunter offered to take him to Gurgaon for treatment. After some lab tests at the Gurgaon hospital, he claims, he was taken for "stomach surgery." When he regained consciousness, there was a scar on his waist. Prakash says that Kumar's men, including Gyasuddin, threatened him physically when he complained.
    But other kidney sellers in Meerut told me that Prakash had been a part of the pyramid. Among those he had allegedly lured was Mohan Lal (not his real name), a sixteen-year-old who had run away from his village after his father discovered his affair with a girl from a different caste. Lal was wandering through Meerut's streets in search of work when, he claims, Prakash offered him a job as a dishwasher at the Gurgaon guesthouse. Once Lal reported for work, he says, he was taken for "free" medical tests and falsely diagnosed with a gallstone that Kumar's assistants told him needed immediate surgery. (Piyush Anand, a senior CBI official who supervised the investigation, said a number of complainants were similarly misled.) After he was relieved of a kidney, Lal reluctantly accepted cash and continued to work at the guesthouse for several months.
    According to Lal and two other kidney sellers, Prakash complained to the police in Moradabad only after a falling-out with Gyasuddin over commission. Prakash, a key witness in the case against Kumar, denies these allegations, but the irony is rich: Kumar's operation may have been undone not by proactive law enforcement but by squabbling within the ranks.
    Â 
    A week after I saw Kumar in Ambala, officials took him to Mumbai for questioning on the charges filed back in 1995. They tried to duck the media by switching trains, but I managed to follow along. On a June evening, I sat outside the police station where Kumar had been taken for interrogation and jotted down questions for a written