Should I continue the original text not in English so I translated
Chapter One: The Kingdom of Tarnished Ivory
The smell of “boiled death” was the only clock the workers of Malik’s factory ever recognized. There were no clocks on the damp walls—only the heavy steam rising from the great boilers, steam carrying particles of phosphorus and dissolved human tissue, clinging to the pores of their skin as if reminding the living they were nothing more than “raw material” still waiting to be processed.
In the darkest corner, where the Hooghly River whispered behind corroded walls, Anant sat on his worn wooden stool. Before him, on a metal table stained with rust and acid, lay a “raw” human skull. It was not yet white; patches of stubborn grey tissue still clung to it, along with strands of faded hair stuck to its left side.
To Anant, the sight was not repulsive. He saw in the skull a “promise of eternity.”
He picked up the coarse wire brush and dipped it into a cup of diluted hydrochloric acid. His movements were slow, ritualistic—like dusting off a deity in an ancient temple. With every scrape across bone, a dry screech echoed through the silent chamber.
“You are being freed now,” Anant whispered inwardly, watching the grey layer dissolve to reveal the pale bone beneath. “All that flesh that once hurt you, all that hunger that once devoured you… it is gone forever.”
A few meters away, Sukit and Ram worked at the “initial stripping vat.” Their bent bodies looked like skeletons wrapped in paper-thin skin, so frail one might mistake them for part of the shipment rather than workers.
Suddenly, Sukit stopped.
His eyes—sunken deep from starvation—flashed with a feral glint under the weak yellow light. He grabbed a pelvic bone that had not been fully cleaned in the boil; a small strip of tendon still clung to it.
Under Anant’s cold gaze, Sukit raised the bone to his mouth.
It was quick. Desperate. Almost afraid of being seen.
He bit into the dead tendon and chewed hard.
He was not chewing flesh. He was chewing survival.
His eyes closed tightly, saliva mixed with the smell of chlorine dripping down his pointed chin.
For the first time, Anant felt no disgust. Only superiority.
He saw in Sukit the purest form of human corruption: need.
But Anant… Anant was something else. A mediator between worlds. He purified the dead of life’s impurities, preparing them for display in the museums of London and the universities of Berlin.
“Anant! Stop worshipping skulls and move!”
The voice of Malik snapped from his glass office suspended like a watchtower.
“Carriages have arrived from the eastern cemetery. The shipment is fresh—too fresh—and the smell is disturbing the neighbors. Down to the floor. Unload immediately!”
The massive iron doors groaned open like the wailing of spirits, and wooden carts rolled in, carrying burlap sacks soaked in river mud. The sacks dripped dark fluids. The true scent of Kolkata—the stench of poverty that cannot be washed away—swallowed the sterile smell of acid and chlorine.
Anant wiped his acid-wet hands on his stained apron and looked at the incoming load.
He did not know that inside one of those sacks lay the skeleton that would shatter his illusion of immortality.
The porters moved heavily across the slick floor, where boiling water and congealed human fat had formed a greasy film. The sacks moaned under their weight. Each impact against the ground sounded like a ripe fruit collapsing into thick mud.
Anant stood at the edge of the cart. The porters—men from outside the factory—covered their faces with damp cloth, not only to escape the stench, but to avoid touching the “material” Anant handled every day. They threw the sacks toward him with urgency, as if discarding a curse.
“Careful! You’re breaking ribs!” Anant shouted, catching a slipping sack.
One porter spat on the ground and glared at him.
“What do you care, grave-robber? Isn’t your job to collect scraps? They’re just corpses, not glass!”
Anant said nothing.
He never did.
Contempt did not hurt him. It was just noise.
He placed his hand on the wet burlap and felt the cold inside. The cold of death—untouched by any sun in Kolkata. For a moment, he felt a strange kinship with what lay inside: both abandoned, both waiting for purification.
“Anant! Here!”
Malik’s voice again, descending from his glass perch like a command from a drowned ship’s captain.
He descended the iron stairs, polished leather boots shining absurdly in the filth, a perfumed handkerchief pressed permanently to his nose.
“This shipment cost me dearly in bribes, Anant. I want royal preparation. Universities in Liverpool complained about fractures in the previous batch. Westerners love perfection—even in death.”
Anant glanced at Malik’s scented handkerchief, then at his own acid-stained hands.
“Westerners want bodies that never suffered,” he said quietly. “They buy these because they are the only ones who never had to pay for burial.”
Malik laughed dryly. His teeth were too white for this place.
“I don’t sell bodies,” he said. “I sell knowledge. Without these poor souls, surgeons in London would never learn how to save a lord’s life. We serve science, don’t we?”
He didn’t wait for an answer.
“Open the sacks. Heads into Acid Vat Two. Limbs into Vat Four. I want bones shining like pearls by dawn!”
Steel knives tore through burlap. Pale limbs emerged. Frozen faces locked in final expressions—some silent screams, some resigned acceptance.
Anant paused.
The smell of sandalwood suddenly invaded his memory.
His father’s funeral.
Twenty years ago.
Back when death still meant something sacred.
Now it was just inventory.
He bent and lifted a thin body from a torn sack.
But he did not feel its weight.
He felt memory.
His father had been a tailor. Tuberculosis had consumed him in a cramped room smelling of damp cloth and cheap tobacco. Neighbors avoided their door. Doctors saw not a man, but a “wasted bed.”
“Life is dirty, my son,” his father once whispered between coughs. “Skin suffers. Flesh decays. Bone is the only truth.”
When his father died, there was no money for proper cremation on the banks of the Ganges. Anant remembered standing in the morgue, watching bodies stacked like garbage. In one corner, he saw a skeleton model hanging clean and white—almost noble amid decay.
That was the moment he chose bone over flesh.
Order over suffering.
Meaning over grief.
“Anant! Are you sleeping on your feet?!”
Sukit’s voice pulled him back.
A corpse of an old woman was being dragged toward the boiling vats. The sorting had begun. The factory was becoming a machine for dismantling humanity.
Anant took the slicing knife.
His task: separate the long bones. The most valuable. The most exportable.
He cut through ligaments and soft decay with mechanical precision, avoiding faces, avoiding names, avoiding humanity itself.
Steam roared. Malik shouted orders. Workers laughed nervously to survive the horror. Bubbles exploded in the vats like dying breaths.
He tossed a femur into the “Grade A” crate.
His hands were now the color of dead skin.
He believed he was purifying the dead.
But he was drowning with them.
Then—
He stopped.
Inside the final sack lay fragments.
Not a body.
A broken skull.
Familiar.
A metal plate on the left side.
Three rusted screws.
Anant’s breath collapsed.
The world went silent.
That plate…
He had paid for it.
Years ago.
To save his brother Nirmal after a train accident.
This was not raw material.
This was Nirmal.