Rasheed’s kidney-extraction scam is a chain of deception that begins with a plan to raise money for a small shop and ends with two sisters dead and Anand Rao charged with murder. Lin recounts the scheme to Kavita: Rasheed persuades his wife and her younger sister to undergo operations, takes the money, and disappears. Anand, unable to accept the sisters’ deaths or his own failure to stop Rasheed, tracks him down and kills him. The account links the exploitation of two vulnerable women to a second act of violence, without treating Anand’s response as undoing what came before.

Background and the First Operation

Before the scheme unfolded, Anand Rao had met Rasheed’s wife and her sister and had come to like them. They were shy but friendly, and Anand may also have become fond of the younger sister. Rasheed and Anand knew each other well: they had shared a hut for two years. That familiarity gives Anand grounds to distrust Rasheed, but it does not prevent the fraud from taking hold.

Rasheed presented the prospect of selling a kidney as the only way for him and his wife to establish the small shop they wanted. His wife objected, but he persuaded her to proceed at a private hospital he knew. After the operation, he reported that the hospital wanted a woman’s kidney rather than a man’s. His wife was understandably reluctant, yet Rasheed persuaded her to go ahead. The first operation thus became more than a single sale: it supplied the premise for pressing the younger sister as well.

The Scheme Expands

When the wife returned from the hospital, Anand challenged Rasheed. He knew him as a con man and was angry about what had happened, but Rasheed denied wrongdoing and responded by spilling kerosene on himself, daring Anand to act if he believed him guilty. Anand did not take the bait. He warned Rasheed to look after the women and left. The confrontation exposes Anand’s suspicion and concern, while also showing how little leverage he had over a man who could turn an accusation into a challenge.

Six months after the first operation, Rasheed told his wife that he had repeatedly tried to sell one of his own kidneys but that the hospital would not accept it. He also said the money from her operation was only half of what they needed for the shop, and that the hospital still wanted women’s kidneys. His wife opposed involving her sister, but Rasheed worked on the younger woman with the argument that refusing would make the wife’s operation and sacrifice pointless. The women eventually agreed. Rasheed sent the younger sister to the hospital, and she returned having undergone the operation and lost a kidney. What had been represented as a shared route to a livelihood had become a repeated extraction from the women, with Rasheed controlling the decisions and the money.

The Sisters’ Deaths and Anand’s Response

Rasheed took the money and ran. The sisters were devastated, their health worsened, and both ended up in hospital. They fell into comas and were pronounced dead within minutes of one another. Anand was at the hospital with others from the slum and remained long enough to see the sheets placed over their faces. Their deaths changed his response from warning Rasheed to pursuing him; Lin recounts that Anand left the hospital overwhelmed by anger and guilt.

Anand knew the drinking places Rasheed frequented and searched them until he found him asleep in a rubbish pit after a binge. Rasheed had paid children to keep rats away from him. Anand sent the children off, sat beside Rasheed, and waited while he slept. He then killed him and remained there until the killing was over. Lin’s account does not present this as a rescue or a restoration of justice: the sisters were already dead, and Anand’s action added another death rather than reversing their loss.

Confession and Narrative Frame

Anand gave himself up and made a full confession. By the time Lin tells the story, he has been charged with murder; the account supplies no later legal outcome. His confession distinguishes his response from Rasheed’s evasion: Rasheed fled with the money, while Anand accepted exposure to the law after killing him. It does not, however, erase the difference between confessing to a crime and repairing the harm that preceded it.

The episode reaches the reader through Lin’s account to Kavita, who is taking notes and using a cassette recorder. Her questions prompt Lin to clarify where the operation occurred, when it happened, and what followed. This layered telling makes the chronology of the fraud legible while keeping Anand’s inner state at a distance: Lin offers anger and guilt as his own reading of Anand’s conduct, not as a direct confession of motive from Anand himself. Elsewhere, Lin describes his own position in the slum as an improvised healer, trained in first aid but unwilling to claim the title of doctor. That context frames him as a witness relaying a story of bodily risk and inadequate power to intervene, rather than as an authority who can settle the sisters’ medical history or Anand’s guilt.