After they agree to donate, sellers are tissue tested, and if there is a match, the broker will offer the seller around $1,150. But in most cases, the sellers do not receive anywhere near that amount. The organ brokers tack on extra fees for travel and other logistics, and the sellers make sometimes only half the initial amount -- and even then only after the surgery is completed.

The brokers forge fake passports and legal documents to make it appear plausible that the seller is donating to a blood relative. In one case, Moniruzzaman found a 38-year-old Hindu seller who had to get circumcised to donate to a Muslim recipient. The circumcision was done crudely and only with local anesthesia. "When I was coming back home, the anesthesia stopped working," he told the anthropologist, "and I felt like it was a nightmare."

Most of the sellers Moniruzzaman spoke to were taken to India for the surgery, and upon arrival they had their passports confiscated so they could not leave. "One case I found [was] a 23-year-old college student," he says. "He went to India and realized that he was making a mistake. So he wanted to come back without giving his kidney. The broker hired two thugs -- Indian thugs -- and they basically beat him and forced him to go to the operation room."

This man, like all the other sellers, woke up from surgery with a 20-inch long scar around his torso -- a constant reminder that he sold part of his body for a few hundred dollars. "We are living cadavers," another told Moniruzzaman. "By selling our kidneys, our bodies are lighter but our chests are heavier than ever."

All but one of the sellers Moniruzzaman interviewed were Muslim, and in Islam there is a strict taboo against body mutilation. After the surgery, feelings of remorse and shame would set in. "They wanted to get rid of their poverty so they got entrapped in that system," he says, "but then they realized that they sold God's gift and when they go back in the afterlife, God would ask them 'Where are your body parts, where are the missing body parts?' And that creates a state where they are living with shame and disgrace."

When they returned to their daily lives, the kidney sellers reported that their economic conditions deteriorated, despite the small influx of cash. Only two of the 33 sellers used the money responsibly. Others were handicapped by the experience, and found themselves unable to do the manual labor they were used to. In the end, the brokers won, earning about $5,000 per transaction.

In Bangladesh, organ trafficking is illegal, but Moniruzzaman finds that it happens more or less out in the open. The classified ads all imply cash exchanges, but never directly say it. At one point in his fieldwork, he even confronted a nephrologist who had a kidney donation ad pinned in the lobby of his office. "I asked the chief nephrologists, 'These ads are everywhere. Why are the state officials not taking a stand and intervening?' And I was told, 'Donation is happening, but it's not buying and selling.' And they claim most of these transactions are happening in other countries, like India, so this is not their problem."