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Authors: Scott Carney
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to file a case against Young Brothers, Khan raided the building with a posse of bamboo-wielding heavies. It was a version of vigilante justice that would have been familiar in nineteenth-century England and America.
“There were two rooms full of human skeletons,” Khan told me. It took five trucks to haul them away. He also seized thousands of documents, including invoices to companies all around the world. “They were sending shipments to Thailand, Brazil, Europe, and the United States,” he says.
Sixteen years after the export ban, it was as if the law had never taken effect. I meet Khan in the back room of a deserted boathouse. He introduces me to a young woman wearing a colorful headscarf who was employed as a clerk for Young Brothers between 1999 and 2001. “We used to fill orders all over the world. We used to buy bones from Mukti Biswas. I saw more than five thousand dead bodies,” she says. She requests anonymity in case of reprisal. The company took in roughly $15,000 a month from abroad, and she tells me that Biswas’s operation was just one of many. There were other suppliers and factories up and down the length of West Bengal.
Khan’s raid prompted the police to arrest Young Brothers’ owner, Vinesh Aron. He spent two nights in jail, but just like Mukti, he was released without charges.
TODAY, THERE ARE NO bones on the roof. I’ve been poking around the area for an hour or so, interviewing neighbors, when a white van pulls up to the building. A man dressed in a pink-checkered shirt steps out. He walks briskly to a side door and knocks: Vinesh Aron.
Aron sees me snapping photos and knocks more forcefully, but his assistant inside is having trouble with the lock. As I try to quickly formulate a question, my translator shoves a microphone in his face and asks whether he’s still shipping skeletons to the West. Looking flustered, Aron blurts out, “We won that case!” The entrance cracks open and he slips in before the door slams in my face.
In a subsequent phone conversation, Aron says he now sells medical models and charts, but no bones. However, a month later I meet a vendor of surgical instrument supplies who claims to be Aron’s brother-in-law; he says Young Brothers is the only bone distributor in the country. Behind the counter of his small shop in Chennai are several cardboard boxes full of rare bones. He pulls a fist-sized skull of a fetus out of one box and smiles like he is holding a rare gem. “My brother-in-law is the only man who still does this in India. He is the only one with guts,” he says. Then he offers to dig up a skeleton for me for1,000 ($25).
The 2006–2007 Young Brothers catalog takes care to inform customers that it abides by the law. It lists a wide assortment of bones at wholesale prices, noting that they’re “for sale in India only.” Yet Indian skeletons are somehow making it out of the country anyway.
In Canada, Osta International sells human bones throughout the United States and Europe. The forty-year-old company offers to fill orders immediately. “About half of our business is in the States,” says Christian Ruediger, who runs the business with his father, Hans.
Ruediger admits that Osta stocks bones from India, presumably smuggled out of the country in violation of the export law. Until a few years ago, he got them from a distributor in Paris, but that source dried up in 2001—around the time Javed Khan raided Young Brothers. Since then, he has bought his stock from a middleman in Singapore. He declines to provide the name. “We want to keep a low profile,” he says.
Of some thirty institutions I contacted in the course of research, the handful that admitted to buying bones in the past few years declined to reveal their sources or speak on record—though Osta’s name did come up twice. “I bought a complete skeleton and a dissected human demonstration skull from Osta,” a professor at a prestigious Virginia college says. “Both were
“There were two rooms full of human skeletons,” Khan told me. It took five trucks to haul them away. He also seized thousands of documents, including invoices to companies all around the world. “They were sending shipments to Thailand, Brazil, Europe, and the United States,” he says.
Sixteen years after the export ban, it was as if the law had never taken effect. I meet Khan in the back room of a deserted boathouse. He introduces me to a young woman wearing a colorful headscarf who was employed as a clerk for Young Brothers between 1999 and 2001. “We used to fill orders all over the world. We used to buy bones from Mukti Biswas. I saw more than five thousand dead bodies,” she says. She requests anonymity in case of reprisal. The company took in roughly $15,000 a month from abroad, and she tells me that Biswas’s operation was just one of many. There were other suppliers and factories up and down the length of West Bengal.
Khan’s raid prompted the police to arrest Young Brothers’ owner, Vinesh Aron. He spent two nights in jail, but just like Mukti, he was released without charges.
TODAY, THERE ARE NO bones on the roof. I’ve been poking around the area for an hour or so, interviewing neighbors, when a white van pulls up to the building. A man dressed in a pink-checkered shirt steps out. He walks briskly to a side door and knocks: Vinesh Aron.
Aron sees me snapping photos and knocks more forcefully, but his assistant inside is having trouble with the lock. As I try to quickly formulate a question, my translator shoves a microphone in his face and asks whether he’s still shipping skeletons to the West. Looking flustered, Aron blurts out, “We won that case!” The entrance cracks open and he slips in before the door slams in my face.
In a subsequent phone conversation, Aron says he now sells medical models and charts, but no bones. However, a month later I meet a vendor of surgical instrument supplies who claims to be Aron’s brother-in-law; he says Young Brothers is the only bone distributor in the country. Behind the counter of his small shop in Chennai are several cardboard boxes full of rare bones. He pulls a fist-sized skull of a fetus out of one box and smiles like he is holding a rare gem. “My brother-in-law is the only man who still does this in India. He is the only one with guts,” he says. Then he offers to dig up a skeleton for me for1,000 ($25).
The 2006–2007 Young Brothers catalog takes care to inform customers that it abides by the law. It lists a wide assortment of bones at wholesale prices, noting that they’re “for sale in India only.” Yet Indian skeletons are somehow making it out of the country anyway.
In Canada, Osta International sells human bones throughout the United States and Europe. The forty-year-old company offers to fill orders immediately. “About half of our business is in the States,” says Christian Ruediger, who runs the business with his father, Hans.
Ruediger admits that Osta stocks bones from India, presumably smuggled out of the country in violation of the export law. Until a few years ago, he got them from a distributor in Paris, but that source dried up in 2001—around the time Javed Khan raided Young Brothers. Since then, he has bought his stock from a middleman in Singapore. He declines to provide the name. “We want to keep a low profile,” he says.
Of some thirty institutions I contacted in the course of research, the handful that admitted to buying bones in the past few years declined to reveal their sources or speak on record—though Osta’s name did come up twice. “I bought a complete skeleton and a dissected human demonstration skull from Osta,” a professor at a prestigious Virginia college says. “Both were
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