Nobody knows what happened to the Lisbon sisters.
That's the whole point of this book turned movie that is centered around five sisters, the Lisbon sisters.
And it's pretty clear from the very first page of the book that all five sisters are going to die by the end of the book.
The movie has a slightly different opening, but the plot remains the same.
The grim outcome is going to be consistent.
Over the course of two summers in this suburban filled blissful, cozy little town and all the other words that these realtors like to use the five lisbon sisters.
Over the course of two summers, every single one of them dies, all five of them, and the entire story is told by the boys across the street.
It's not even told by the lisbon sisters.
So we really only know what these five boys from across the street know, And these boys, they grew up snooping on the Lisbon sisters.
They would get those telescopes pointed at the Lisbon sisters' windows at night.
They would try to get invited over to the Lisbon household to steal the sisters' diaries, the pictures,
The Lisbon sisters have this incredibly mysterious aura to the boys because they're all blonde, they're all conventionally very attractive and they're all kept cooped up in this house.
Their parents are super religious and strict.
They never let them out on dates with boys.
They never let them out to hang out.
The five sisters always feel like they know something that nobody else knows.
They keep to themselves and there's like this air of melancholy that just hangs over all the five sisters.
They almost become mythical in the town.
All five sisters, beautiful.
They exude girlhood and yet each one of them dies by self-exit.
And the boys, they grow up 20 years later.
And even as adults, as men, they can't understand why the girls from their childhood, the Lisbon sisters, would do such a thing.
Why would they leave this beautiful life?
Especially, why would they leave their beautiful bodies?
I mean, it's not like they were bullied for being unconventionally attractive.
Nobody gets the Lisbon sisters.
Mainly because nobody cares about the Lisbon sisters.
The Lisbon sisters.
They see that they are just passive objects that the world feels like they need to either conquer or consume, and that is it.
That's how they feel about girlhood.
There's a famous quote from the movie when one of the Lisbon sisters gets hospitalized after trying to and the doctor tells her you're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.
She's 13.
And she just responds, obviously doctor, you've never been a 13 year old girl.
Throughout the whole movie, you see the boys across the street, they steal the sisters' diaries.
They skim the boring parts and they just focus on the sexuality journeys and the parts that make them excited.
And yet at the end, they still don't understand.
It befuddles them why these girls would die.
When it is so clear to everybody watching or reading this novel, it's not that they don't know why.
It's that the boys don't care about why.
People say that this movie is what popularized the term male gaze.
And since the Lisbon sisters' whole life story is being told by these brothers, you never know why.
At the end,
Because the brothers never know why.
Is this a true story or no?
No, this is a novel turned movie.
You never know why it happened because the boys never found out why.
And 20 years later, it's almost like the Lisbon sisters are just this myth, this legend, in their mind.
It's not about who the girls were, what happened to them and why.
It's all about who the girls could have been to somebody else.
That's the whole point.
They're more so grieving the loss of potential on what the girls could have provided for the neighborhood boys.
Like perhaps one of them could have been the hottest wife out of all your friends, or like a loving wife that bakes the softest chocolate cookies.
It's grieving the potential of how the girls could have fit into boys' lives later on, rather than grieving the loss of life.
The boys also complain about how they and ultimately you know they're the center of the stories.
These girls are just the side plots.
They complain about how they never found out the reason to why and it's almost like a mystery for the boys to figure out.
It's not about the girls lives.
There's this quote that says it didn't matter in the end how old they had been or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them and they hadn't heard us calling which, by the way, they never did.
Still do not hear us up in the treehouse with our thinning hair and soft bellies calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for a long time, alone in death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
I see.
Which means for the boys, the Lisbon girls were just for saving.
It's like this infuriating story.
They didn't care until they died.
It's almost like the boys, they're at loss rather than the girls, right?
They lost their lives.
Yeah.
And it becomes like a fantasy, something to obsess over for these boys.
Like this was a big part of my childhood.
It's a canon event because when a girl is dead, they say that she can be whatever you want in your mind.
She is no longer around to tell you what happened.
So you can make it whatever fantasy that you want.
And that is what the boys ultimately end up doing.
A lot of people feel frustrated by this book and this movie, but they understand.
The whole point is that the audience is never supposed to know why the lisbon sisters did what they did.
You can keep guessing.
Your guess is probably better than those idiot boys, but ultimately we're all still guessing, because nobody wanted to ask the lisbon sisters if they were okay, or talk to them or figure out what was wrong before it's too late.
Instead, after they die, everyone in the book comes up with their own reasoning for why they did it.
Everyone fits their own, like each story fits each person's life story a little bit better.
For the boys it's like this enigma, this fantasy of what could have been of girlhood.
That's like lost so quickly.
Something to fixate over.
And then the girls are just empty shells.
They just project whatever they want onto the girls.
Oh, the girl could have been this.
The girl could have been that.
But like, it doesn't matter to them who the girl was.
And that is the real life case right now that is unfolding in India of the Kumar sister's death.
Three sisters, 16 years old, 14 years old, and 12 years old.
So three of them all fall to their deaths from the ninth floor balcony of their house.
And their entire lives and their deaths are told by this one man in their lives.
And everything about it just seems fishy.
This is the case of the Kumar sisters.
We would like to thank today's sponsors who have made it possible for Rotten Mango to support NAMI National, also known as the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
NAMI is the nation's largest mental health organization.
This episode's partnerships have also made it possible to support Rotten Mango's growing team, and we'd also like to thank you guys for your continued support.
As always, full show notes are available at rottenmingopodcast.com.
A big disclaimer for today's case.
There's very strong themes of self-exit, perhaps tech addiction, as well as mentions of potential inter-familial relations that are not of the norm.
So please take care of yourself, don't hesitate to take a break, and we will see you in the next one.
With that being said, let's get into it.
The Kumar sisters do everything together.
They eat together, they sleep together, they shower together.
If one of them has to use the restroom, all three of them will just lie in like a line, like little ducks, and go to the restroom together.
Everything they do is together, which I feel is a bit more understandable when they were really young.
But now that they're 12, 14 and 16 years old, The three sisters a lot of people assumed that they would want to have more alone time.
They would want to develop their own identities and have some privacy.
Even their dad, Mr. Kumar, he questions it at one point.
Like even using the toilet together.
Like why do you have to do everything together?
Even the toilet?
They just respond, Papa, we do everything together.
Only together.
But it's not as if they are carbon copies of each other.
It's not like three different individuals, but they all have the same personalities and they all behave the same way.
They're each very different.
Their grandma, from their mom's side, describes them as being well, the oldest one of the sisters, the 16-year-old.
Very timid.
You know, between mom and dad, if there was a fight between mom and dad, she would get scared.
Just completely scared.
She's the oldest, but gets the most easily scared, the most timid.
And then the youngest one of the three sisters, the 12 year old, also the same.
Constantly timid, very nervous if there's any disagreements in the house.
However, the 14 year old, the middle sister, grandma says, very clever.
Smart girl.
Very, very clever girl.
Her mind is very good.
It's sharp compared to the older sister.
She describes her, as you know, the 16 year old is quite simple, very simple, and the youngest is also quote very lucky because she's also quite simple.
So that's what the grandma is saying and which, just to add context, being called simple, from what i can tell on i was like on india r slash reddit, being called simple is not really considered an insult in india, like it might be more so in the united states.
One redditor explains simple is actually a compliment.
Usually it implies responsible, humble and grounded.
It doesn't mean too many desires, mostly a compliment in India.
No one uses it in such a negative sense.
So I guess like it would kind of ring true in East Asia, too.
Like you're not trying to do crazy things all the time and. not sticking out of the norm.
Like that's a compliment in certain areas.
I can think of something in Chinese that's like simple, pure-ish.
Yeah.
Because I know in America, we associate it with being dumb.
That's not what the grandma is saying.
She's not calling them dumb.
Now, grandma continues, but the middle sister, she's not scared.
She was very courageous.
But she has a tendency, according to her grandma, to quote, get lost.
Sometimes she would just sit and sometimes she would just not talk to us.
It's like she's in her own little world.
February 4th, 2026 at 2.15am, all three Kumar sisters will be found dead.
There are a few justifiable reasons why one might be out perusing the neighborhood at 2 in the morning in the complete dark, one of which does not include standing still, body stiff, just staring up at the sky.
An elderly neighbor is walking back home and he comes across one of the younger neighbors, maybe in his 20s I mean younger compared to the elderly neighbor And he sees this young man just staring up at the sky as if he's in a trance, as if a UFO carrying three-headed horses is about to descend upon the neighborhood.
So this old guy is following the neighbor's gaze up up up, up 80 feet, up until he hits the ninth floor of the apartment building.
And maybe the older neighbor's eyes aren't so good, because it's very likely that he hears it before he sees it.
It's like three explosive, almost gunshot noises. and now at the bottom of the building on the ground are the three kumar sisters the neighbors are all gathered around anyone who is still awake inside the apartment building they're all now waking up their family members they're all heading downstairs including the kumar parents initially the story seems like and this is according to the younger neighbor who had been staring He says he stopped on his walk because it was very odd.
He saw these moving figures out on a balcony late at night and the way they were just moving about just seemed odd to him.
It's in the dark, no light, it just didn't feel right.
Quote, it looked quite abnormal.
It was around 2 a.m. and there was no light on.
It was a bit suspicious actually.
And if someone is sitting on the balcony at two in the morning, it's even more suspicious, no?
So what did he see?
He states that he believes initially that one sister was falling from the balcony and the other two tried to save her and fell too.
Whether it was intentional or not, he cannot be sure.
So that instantly brings up a few theories.
One.
One of the three sisters fell accidentally and the other two fell accidentally in an attempt to save her.
All accidental.
This is completely ruled out by the fact that they left behind a detailed eight page note beforehand.
Wow.
What kind of balcony?
Is this a balcony that you have to climb up?
Yeah.
You would have to get a stool and then climb on top of the stool and then go over the railing and then Right.
How is that accidental?
Even the first... Yeah.
Perhaps you could argue.
Maybe she was like sitting.
She propped herself up on the balcony, which I don't see that to be feasible.
But judging by the note, the whole accidental theory doesn't make sense.
So the second theory comes about.
One sister intentionally falls and the other two accidentally fall in an attempt to save her.
But again, that's hard to believe because all three of them partook in this eight-page note.
So then the third theory is, okay, one sister intentionally falls.
The other two try to save her because maybe they thought the note was a joke.
But when they realize it's too late, they're like, I can't live with this.
So they also fall.
But again, that doesn't make sense.
Which leaves four.
The theory that all three sisters all went one by one and fell intentionally.
But why?
I mean, you get how kind of, but why?
The neighbor just saw.
He doesn't know.
He just responds.
I don't know, I just saw all three of them jumping from the front.
Before I could even understand what was happening or calling out, the whole incident was over.
When the first one fell, they described the sound like an explosion.
And then it happens two more times.
When the sisters are rushed to the hospital, they are pronounced deceased upon arrival.
They had fallen 80 feet from the air, so from the ninth floor balcony.
And now you have a 16-year-old girl that is now deceased, a 14-year-old girl that is now deceased and a 12-year-old girl.
And this is where, like the novel in the movie Virgin Self Exit, which we just talked about in the intro, nobody knows why.
The story of why changes depending on who you ask.
If you ask her parents, they're going to say one thing.
Authorities are going to say another thing.
The press are saying something else.
And then the netizens are saying something entirely different.
And it's not a simple clean cut case either.
The sister's family background is very confusing.
The three Kumar sisters.
They're all sisters.
They all live together with mom and dad, but they have different moms.
So they, two sisters share the same mom.
One sister has a mom and they live with both the moms and the dad in the house.
The oldest of the three sisters is from Mr. Kumar's first marriage.
The two other sisters are from Mr Kumar's second marriage, but the sisters are also half siblings, you know cause they're only half related, but they're also cousins.
Because Mr. Kumar's first wife and second wife are biological sisters.
What?
He married two biological sisters, had kids with them, and they all live together.
And he also now has a third wife that also lives in this house that he has kids with.
A woman named Tina.
And all of them live in this ninth floor apartment.
There are more kids in the house?
Another daughter and a son.
And they're very young.
Whoa.
And all of them live in the same apartment building, the same one that the three girls just fell out of.
And in the sisters' rooms, there's something scribbled on the walls.
It reads, I am very, very alone.
My life is very, very alone.
Make me a heart of broken.
And next to an eight-page note that they wrote before they fell is a diary that just has the words read now written on it.
When news of the Kumar sisters' death starts circulating, everyone has the very obvious question of okay, why?
One teenager self-exiting is already devastating and requires a pretty introspective look into the child's circumstances.
But three sisters at the same time?
I mean, there has to be something big, or at least something that everyone is hoping for there to be a reason, because they want it to be bigger than mental health.
Because mental health is something that it seems like most parents in most countries don't don't want to address explicitly.
So the natural conclusion comes to this phone addiction.
The three girls are so addicted to their phones.
They would rather die than be apart from their phones.
One people magazine title is quote three teen sisters jumped to their deaths from ninth floor apartment after parents remove access to phones.
How did that come about?
So the dad said he did take away their phones recently and they really liked their phones and they were always on their phones.
And so he thinks that's why that these three sisters did the drastic thing that they did.
So this came from the dad.
The dad said that's why they jumped.
And the media is like, that makes sense.
And they just start reporting it.
One expert states, adolescents today live dual lives, one physical and one digital.
If the digital one collapses, some feel like they have no life left at all.
This feels like a situation of okay, let's just keep adding on top of it until no one can see what we're going to bury.
To begin with, because after that's reported that the kumar sisters probably did this because their phones were taken away from them, a lot of people, myself included, start questioning that narrative, like it's already so unheard of to begin with, but if it is true that all three sisters did this because their phones were taken away, that indicates that something is not okay with the kids the Typically children that develop such strong, deep addictions to their devices.
Their addiction to the phone is just a presentation of the symptoms.
It's not the problem.
The problem is usually family life, home life cyberbullying bullying abuse, lack of community mental health, illnesses that are being ignored.
It's not just like, I love my phone, I'm addicted to my phone.
It's statistically uncommon for children to die from phone addiction.
They could have phone addiction and then get roped in by a predator.
They could have phone addiction and then become victim to cyberbullying or blackmail.
But just to have your phone taken away and that be the reason that you self-exit.
It's not statistically common at all.
But you said they left a note, right?
Yes.
So did they write something?
That whole note has not been released to the public.
Excerpts of that note have been released and it's weird.
It's really weird.
So none of this makes sense for even one child to die because they got their phone taken away.
But now you're saying it's all three sisters.
Is there some sort of?
I know a lot of people were thinking it was when all three sisters could go into a state of psychosis together, but that doesn't seem to be the case either.
So there must be something darker on that phone.
Then comes new information.
See, this is why I'm like it feels like this case.
People just keep stacking information on top when questions start arising.
Right.
Okay.
So back to the phone thing.
The dad told the news that he took away all three girls' phone.
Well, only two of the girls had phones.
Okay.
And then one of them had their phone taken away three months ago.
So all three of them were sharing one phone.
And then that phone was taken away recently.
Oh, so they're all sharing one phone.
And now all three of them have no phone.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
That's a bizarre conclusion for a father to come to.
So then they come up with new information.
They were playing a task-based game that told them to do it.
There was this big scare back during the COVID days of the blue whale game.
Do you remember that?
Okay, it's like a 50.
It's an alleged 50 day, 50 task challenge where, over the course of 50 days, kids would download the blue whale challenge or talk to people on Discord about it and they would have to complete 50 tasks, one for each day, and they all start rather innocent.
It's like watch a scary movie, wake up in the middle of the night, and then the game finally instructs you at the end of the 50 day mark to commit the very last task, which largely turned out to be not true, this whole blue whale challenge.
There was a small connection between a few deaths in europe, specifically russia, and the imagery of blue whales, and it could have been due to a very famous song in russia that is centered around blue whales.
Or it could have been due to the fact that blue whales sometimes beach themselves, causing their own deaths.
So they'll beach themselves on the shore and then they'll die.
A lot of people think that it's the most reminiscent of the human self-exit.
Because a lot of animals have very strong... They don't want to die.
So a lot of that imagery has been associated perhaps with the connection of really dark thoughts.
Scientists don't really have an answer for why blue whales beach themselves.
There's not really a solid one.
It could be stressors from habitat change, weather sickness.
It could be illnesses lurking underneath.
It could be really unfortunate situations where one beached whale gets stuck and starts sending out insane distress signals which leads to a lot of whales coming to help and then ends up sometimes dozens of them are getting beached really.
Others say that they're getting disoriented by really strong naval sonar signals being sent to them and they panic and they rapidly surface and then it causes decompression sickness which ends with them getting beached.
Others have argued that it really depends on the geographical location and then you can kind of fit one of the better theories around this very strange phenomenon.
For a lot of people it just sounds very human to beat yourself.
Why is it very human?
Because humans seem to be one of the few animal species that will instigate their death.
Oh, I see that is the connection between the blue whale imagery and a few russian teenagers who ultimately self-exited.
Instead of accepting and turning the conversation of why these kids did what they did and talking about mental health, here comes this story of these children were being preyed upon, probably by an online game like the blue whale challenge, and that seems to be where this entire theory of this game existing spawns out of.
It then leads to forums and a ton of Discord servers and Telegram group chats now trying to recreate the game.
You're talking about blue whale.
Yeah, a lot of people are like, oh my gosh, this blue whale challenge exists.
So then all of these people who want to be edgy teenagers on discord, they start trying to recreate it and actually trying to start and make a blue whale challenge.
There was even a russian musician who confessed to creating the game, creating the challenge, but everybody says yeah, he's just saying whatever, because his entire marketing scheme for the past, however long his career has been around, is to create shock content and then push people to listen to his music.
Outlets.
Like the BBC question if the Blue Whale game as we know it ever even really existed at all, but it was one of the biggest scares in 2019.
That's interesting.
Yeah, so alas, a new story emerges with this case.
They were involved in one of these task-based games.
That is what Mr. Kumar is saying about his three daughters, the Kumar sisters.
So again, this comes from the father.
Yes.
The father is saying they're playing.
Yes.
He's just telling the authorities like they were playing these task based games and it just the task probably told them to do this.
What?
Not a single one of the three girls thought, OK, maybe this is too far.
Like maybe this isn't a game that we should play.
Also, what game were they allegedly playing if the blue whale game isn't even a real game?
Furthermore, if these kids are doing task-based challenges that only escalate until it becomes this sinister, would it not be safe to assume that there would have been other signs?
Yeah, they've been doing a lot of bizarre challenges, right?
Did the parents not notice anything strange?
They wouldn't even call each other by their given names.
That's what the parents say.
They would pick names from TV shows or movies that they watched and they would start calling each other those names, like Maria, Aliza and Cindy.
Those were their new names.
Parents report.
It's like they were living in a parallel world where their parents friends, everyone just was shut out, so they didn't have to come back to reality.
The girls would spend 20 hours a day on their phone, which you know.
Why didn't the parents stop them?
We don't know.
Their dad says, I didn't know about the game.
I just knew they were on the phone.
I didn't know about the game.
I didn't know that the game instructs them to end it.
Did you say 20 hours a day?
Yeah.
They sleep four hours and then just stay on the phone for 20 hours?
That's what he says.
But I don't know.
What is he talking about?
Now, he says, I mean, you know, tell me what kind of father would let their daughters die.
Tell me what kind of father would let their kid play a game that's going to cause their death.
They did it because of the game.
They were performing the tasks given out by the game.
But it's the way in the interviews with Mr Kumar, the way he's doing these interviews there's no emotion.
There's no inflection in his voice.
He almost sounds bothered by having to explain what happened to the press, but not in this emotional.
I'm so distraught and you hungry bottom feeding reporters won't leave me alone until I make a statement.
So here's your goddamn statement.
It's not like that.
There's almost like a weird air of just kind of nonchalant energy that seems very ill-fitting for a man in his position.
He didn't even just lose one daughter, he lost three daughters.
He lost three kids.
He seems way too calm, at least that's what netizens believe.
Left behind in the girls room is the eight page note that reads true life story, with a sad face emoji.
And it's a mixture of Hindi and English and the full copy has yet to be released.
And next to that is their diary with instructions for their father to read it which again, the full copy is yet to be released.
And their diary is seemingly at odds with everything that we've learned so far.
Mainstream media is telling us it's a phone addiction, maybe social media addiction.
It's blue whale game.
But when you see excerpts from the diary, one portion reads you don't know how much we loved korea.
Now see the proof.
Now it's confirmed here that korea and k-pop groups are our lives.
Another portion reads death is better for us than your beatings.
This is why we are self-exiting.
Sorry papa, this is the diary.
This is not from their notes.
The sorry papa is from their note.
And then the diary is the.
This is why we love korea.
This is why we love this.
This is how much we love korea.
This is how much we love korea.
So the whole Korean thing starts to slowly take over every news article about the Kumar sisters.
It started with three sisters with a phone addiction.
Then it went to three sisters playing a task-based game online.
Then now it's becoming three sisters obsessed with Korean culture die.
They did not just die from a phone addiction or from a game, which I mean.
Those were nonsensical explanations to begin with.
When the dad would even explain the game, he doesn't know what game he's talking about.
He doesn't know what tasks they would do.
Some reports even firmly state that the police have ruled out a task-based game.
So all of that isn't making any sense.
And now the father has a new version of events of why the girls did what they did.
And it all starts and ends with South Korea.
He said he wants everything Korea banned in India.
He says Korean content should be banned in India.
No Korean dramas, no Korean videos, no Korean channels.
My demand from the government is ban all Korean dramas, videos, channels in India.
Nothing Korea should be running in India.
The girl's diary reads, you don't know how much we loved Korea.
The way we loved Korean actors and K-pop groups.
We didn't even love family members that much.
They proceed to list 19 things about Korean Japanese Chinese British Thai, American culture that their parents did not let them partake in.
And it's primarily a list of shows and movies that their parents disproved of, including cartoons like Shin-chan and Doraemon.
They even wrote about how they have... Remember how they have a younger sister?
It's a four-year-old little girl.
And they were upset that the parents influenced her.
First because they were really excited to make the four-year-old sister quote their own, but instead their parents kept showing the four-year-old girl bollywood movies rather than korean movies, which they write in their journal about their four-year-old sister quote you made her bollywood, which we hated more than life itself.
So this is from their diary.
Yeah, and three girls share one diary kumar.
The father has stated in an interview they listened to korean music.
They watched korean films and dramas, web series and cartoons.
They also wanted to go to Korea.
All three wanted us to accept Korean culture.
But when we refused their behavior, I mean, they went into a shell and lived in their own world.
Their dad says they would only dress Korean.
They would do their hair in Korean styles.
They use symbols that were in the squid games.
Their wallpapers on their phones were pictures of them wearing Korean style clothes.
According to one report, their dad tried to hire them a tutor, but all of that kind of goes down the drain when the three sisters introduce themselves with their new names Maria, Lisa and Cindy which okay, it's fine whatever.
The tutor assigns the girls homework.
They fail to bring back the homework.
The tutor says.
I sought to know the reason why and they gave me a really weird answer that they had been adopted from Korea and China.
But she's like, what does that have to do with your homework?
So she brings it up with the dad, and he's like, oh yeah, they're just so obsessed with Korea.
I feel like there's something missing because everything just sounds so... Not real.
Unrelated.
Yeah, like, what does that mean?
Sure, like you can be obsessed with Korean culture and K-pop and all that, but like And that's why I think the book and movie Virgin Self-Exit it reminds me so much of this case is because it seems like everyone who is explaining the girl's actions don't know a thing about what it means to even be a young girl.
Like, oh, it's a phone addiction.
Oh, it's a task-based game that we have no proof of.
But like, it must be a game or something because isn't that what the kids are doing?
They're like playing games.
Oh, they loved K-dramas, so telling you they wanted to be korean.
And it's weird like, it's very like i don't think you understand what it.
What these girls are even thinking about and these different theories are all came from the father.
It seems like they start with the father.
There's gonna be more on the father, but he just says they have a fixation on everything korean and because they were not korean, because they couldn't go to korea, they died.
Okay, we don't have to go down the ollie london rabbit hole again.
He is notoriously a white man who did a ton of plastic surgery and came out to say that he will now be identifying as a korean man.
I believe he's no longer korean, though i think he's christian now.
So here we are.
I don't know.
I mean, it's not unheard of for people to claim that they are no longer the ethnicity that they are.
It's weird, but it's been done before.
And with the recent rise of people being fascinated by Korean culture and, more dangerously, people fetishizing Korean partners, it's not the most unheard of thing.
However, it does not make sense that three sisters would die because of it.
It just doesn't make any sense at all.
Like sure you can have that as an indirect reason, such as they wanted to be Korean and underwent surgery but died on the operating table.
They wanted to be Korean and tried this underground black market pill that someone sold them that would make them Korean.
They wanted to be Korean, so they got kidnapped by someone who promised to take them to Korea.
But not just they wanted to be Korean.
Period.
That's it.
That's how they died.
Like there has to be more to it.
It doesn't make sense.
It's reported to the police that the night of their deaths, the sisters had taken their mom's phone to try and use it to get back onto the Korean games they were allegedly obsessed with.
We don't even know what game really.
So now it's not only a task-based game, it's a task-based Korean game.
Okay, so the dad is like, yeah, they were trying to get back on that Korean game.
What does task-based game even mean?
I guess it's you do tasks in real life.
Okay.
Like the blue whale challenge is like you get tasked in real life.
It's not like, hey, go on this game and you get to make your own little character on the game.
So that's not even like a mobile game.
That's like a Discord game with someone.
Okay.
Interestingly though, when police look into the mom's phone, there's no evidence of any sort of game or app being used that night.
So either the girls were unable to get on the app or maybe this story doesn't make any sense.
When their dad took away their phones, they wrote in their diary, sorry, Papa, Korea was our life.
How did you even dare to take this from us?
We love Korean.
Love, love, love.
And it seems like Mr Kumar firmly believes that Korea is the reason that his three daughters are gone.
Judging off of the way he's doing interviews and what's been found in their diaries.
He tells the press, who naturally have a lot of questions.
They even created a whole YouTube channel dedicated to K-dramas.
They had about 2,000 subscribers, but 10 days before their deaths, they deleted it.
I don't think it was voluntary.
So in other reports Kumar, the father, says that he forced them to delete their channels based off of their growing fixation on Korean culture.
They just keep living in their own world.
He says that he believes probably him forcing them to delete their YouTube channel.
Taking away their phones really sent them off the deep end.
They broke.
He says, I used to pamper my children a lot.
They would watch K-dramas, Korean games, Korean reels.
Their eyes were swollen, which is why I took away their phones.
They were angry about this.
Is taking away your child's phone a sin?
He says the night of their deaths around 10 p.m.
So only four hours before they passed.
He spoke with the girls and he says before he went to sleep in his room.
He asked the girls did you guys eat dinner?
They respond, yes, we want to go to Korea.
Mr Kumar says they insisted on going to Korea again, but I told them we are Indians and we should behave like one instead of adopting a foreign culture.
This is so bizarre.
What?
And he says that they could not live without their connection to Korea, which they only got through their phones.
And maybe it's the way that the family and Mr. Kumar specifically have spoken about this incident.
The mothers.
I mean, they've been largely out of the public eye, but it's the way that he just keeps saying it's Korea.
It's a Korean obsession.
Maybe he is trying to say that the girls fell into a deep depression because they were unable to have a Korean connection or be Korean.
Maybe he's trying to say it's depression. but it just comes off really confusing.
One comment puts it heartlessly.
What?
So the girls wanted to become Korean and the father said they have to be Indian.
This is so confusing and like funny.
I don't know why they said that, but that's what the comment reads.
When Koreans read this too, I'm sure they'll also be confused because as Indians, we're so confused.
It seems to me that the girls thought Korea was some kind of paradise in which characters and happenings of their games were literally true.
Such fantasies are becoming common amongst growing kids.
The whole thing is just weird.
Maybe everyone, myself included we are all naive and we don't want to believe it's possible for three sisters to just do this because they love Korea, or it's just weird.
So, for example, when going through all the different reports, some reports say that the eldest daughter, the 16 year old, got her phone three months ago.
Some say six months ago, but it was sold three months ago.
So she only had it for three months.
Then the 14 year old girl, the middle sister, got a phone 15 days ago, but it was taken away maybe 48 hours before their deaths.
But regardless, if they got their phone six months ago and it was taken away three months ago, or three months ago and then it was recently taken away, it doesn't really matter.
All I'm saying is the girls, the three sisters, probably had one or two phones that they were sharing.
For what?
Max three months.
It's kind of bizarre to think that they would create such a strong universe inside of their phones, inside of their heads, in that time span that they would come to such a fatal decision at the end because of addiction.
Furthermore, one comment online puts it really well.
Sure, yeah, the kids might be addicted to their phones, but that's not why they did what they did.
There's definitely a bigger reason why.
They had to rely on apps for emotional support.
Why did nobody bother checking up on them?
But what's even stranger is that in that interview their father says that they had been addicted to this Korean task-based video game for the past two and a half three years, which is weird considering they haven't had a phone for that long.
What game?
He doesn't know what game.
Some reports say the police came out and flat out said there is no game.
So we don't even know what game he's talking about.
But there's just.
He keeps referencing a game.
Doesn't even sound like he knows what he's talking about.
No, and then when people ask like what kind of tasks?
Right, he can easily just be like hey, here's the game.
Yeah, like that will like explain so many questions that everybody has Okay.
So he was asked multiple times and I was watching a few interviews and it was very frustrating.
The reporters keep asking him well, can you give us an example of the different types of tasks that they would do?
So I don't think the reporters are even skeptical of him.
I think it's more so.
There is a huge fear probably in every nation, including india, definitely in places like australia where i think you can't even have social media if you're under the age of 15 now.
But in india they want to have similar laws put in place, i see.
And so a lot of the reporters are like tell us what kind of tasks, so that other parents can notice if their kids are doing these tasks.
But the dad would just say things like can you really believe as a man, as a father, i would let my kids die.
That's his like go-to response multiple times.
He's asked about specific tasks or specific questions.
And he always says, would a father think about it?
If I knew they were playing this game, would a father let their kids die?
And I just thought it was a little odd.
Yeah, normally no, but he's being so sus.
So why does he keep saying that?
I feel like we, didn't we read it somewhere?
That's like a default like response to something that you don't want to admit.
Yeah.
So bizarre.
It's very bizarre.
And I think okay.
Normally I would be very hesitant and very cautious of casting any sort of doubt on any of the family members involved.
But I think the household really needs to be looked at because when you have three children, have such a drastic action, there's something going on in their lives.
And if the parents failed to notice it, is it truly they were that good at not being alert and not being aware of what's happening with their kids?
At the very least, is it neglect, right?
It just doesn't make any sense.
What about the moms?
They have been very quiet.
They're not even doing interviews.
The grandma on the mom's side did an interview, which we're going to get into in a second.
But she's like, I love my kids.
I love my grandkids.
I love my son-in-law.
How's dad's energy?
Like you said, he's so nonchalant.
I didn't see him cry.
I don't see him choke up.
It's just weird.
The way he responds is very aggressive.
But again, not in the way that I would be able to understand of.
I am grieving.
Leave me alone.
It's not that kind of aggressive.
It's more like, I mean, what kind of dad will let their kids die?
Why are you even asking me these questions?
We need to ban Korea.
Like it's very like that.
Very interesting.
Yeah.
It feels like he's like trying to point finger at someone or something.
That's not him.
That's not him.
But everything he point at just doesn't stick.
There's no logical reasons to think that's the reason.
And that's why I think we keep getting new things to try and stick on to.
So phone addiction, video game, and now Korea and Korean video game.
Right.
He says that they were playing this Korean video game for two and a half, three years.
We don't know what game.
And they didn't have a phone for that long.
So we don't know how they were playing.
Maybe they were using their parents' phone to play.
But we don't know about that either, because remember the night that they passed.
They took their mom's phone and they tried to use the game.
Police took the mother's phone, ran forensics on it.
There was no evidence of any game being accessed.
So did they have made up that story then?
What's going on?
I guess he could argue that they tried to get the game but they couldn't get the game, or it was password, but i don't know.
But also it just doesn't make sense.
How are they playing for three years, but then they didn't have a phone for that long.
But then when you check the mom's phone she doesn't have the game.
So where were they playing this game for two and a half three years?
Nobody even knows what game they're talking about.
And there is a list of video games on the girl's diary that they wrote about loving, because they had all these lists of all the shows that they love, movies that they love that their parents don't like.
And it was a list of games that are on the horror side.
Now, these are completely legal, normal games.
Just horror-themed games that anyone of a certain age can play.
They certainly don't tell you to do things in real life.
If anything, they'll just make you have kind of a scary dream at night.
Poppy Playtime, The Baby in Yellow, Ice Cream Man, Evil Nun, Ice Cream Game.
These are all... You can get them on Steam Deck.
They're not Black Market.
I got a download from a Discord server.
Not Black Market, but you get it.
They're so niche and weird.
They're just like...
Just regular smuggler games?
Yeah, probably put out by some of the biggest gaming companies in the world.
It's not these super niche, we don't know what's going on inside this game.
And the girl wrote it because the dad banned them from playing it or doesn't...
Just disproved it.
Right.
I see.
But they didn't write any sort of game that is Blue Whale.
That's very interesting.
Yeah.
So it seems like, I mean, this is just me, right?
What I'm gathering.
It sounds like the girl likes to play video games and the girl likes K-pop or Korean TV shows.
And the dad doesn't like any of those.
So Korean shows?
No.
Gaming?
No.
And in his mind he turned this into like they want to be Koreans and they are addicted to these Korean games.
Yeah.
Because their diary are very normal teenager behavior.
Like, this is so weird.
Yeah, it's weird.
It's like asking his dad to explain video games.
Yeah.
It's just fishy.
Something is off.
Something feels wrong about it.
Especially when you factor in all the other oddities of this case.
Like how one page in the girl's diary reads, Do we live in this world to get beaten by you?
Death would be better for us than these beatings.
Another excerpt in their diary reads, Who are they getting beaten by?
Who and why would they be getting married?
They're children.
They're 12, 14 and 16 years old.
And they're not the first ones to die from that balcony.
Almost a decade ago in 2015, another woman had fallen from the same exact balcony.
She was partially clothed and she let out a big scream before falling to the ground.
It is reported that this was the live-in girlfriend of the father, Mr. Kumar.
So he's got three wives and a live-in girlfriend that also died in 2015.
She had fallen and originally reports stated that she was trying to hang clothes outside to dry but slipped and fell.
Ultimately, most mainstream outlets seem to agree on the fact that the police closed the case, stating she self-exited.
When the father was asked about his live-in girlfriend that died in the very similar fashion, he just responds i don't want to talk about this.
That's crazy.
So his girlfriend back in the day died in this fashion, and now the three daughters, yeah.
So what is the cause?
Is it video games?
Is it korea?
It can't all be a coincidence, right?
Netizens don't think so.
One comment reads all these explanations of their deaths look like a bunch of buzzwords thrown together.
We gotta look at the history of the family.
One netizen comment reads the blue whale game itself was a case of mass hysteria.
There's very little evidence of such a game existing.
Most of the victims are just really sad teens and most probably their parents were giving police extremely false leads.
This seems to also be the case here, even though it might not be the parents fault, but many times parents are negligent towards the mental health of their kids.
Hence they might put blame on some game to escape from taking responsibility.
Another comment reads obsession with korean culture is just a symptom.
The real issue is loneliness and isolation, And I think netizens would be less skeptical if the girl's father took responsibility for maybe not being as present in the girl's lives.
But he just keeps blaming it on everybody else.
He says, quote, I have no fault here.
I took care of them.
Maybe the only mistake was providing a phone, and through the phone they got connected to the Korean world.
But when you dig deeper, there's way more to it than just K-dramas.
The girls dropped out of school in 2020.
They weren't going to school ever since.
They haven't been homeschooled.
They were not going to socialize with other kids.
They had zero education for the past five years.
Their grandmother on their mom's side states, everyone loved them.
They were good girls.
They had good values.
They used to study and write and everything which could be true, they could be self-learning, but i'm not sure how productive.
That is just a few months before their passing, like i said, their father had hired a tutor to privately tutor the three girls.
All three of them stopped going to school in 2020.
Yeah, that's crazy because the youngest one's only 12.
That means she hasn't been since she was seven.
Yeah, seven like first grade.
Yeah, like.
What's the reason?
Did they, the father, explain?
No,
He says that he did try to get a tutor for them three months before their passing.
And that tutor has now come out to say I mean, I didn't spend a lot of time with them, but they were very weak in their studies.
At their age, they couldn't even do basic calculations.
Even the 16 year olds, they could barely recognize numbers.
Quote, they couldn't even copy numbers or letters from textbooks.
So like I said, they refused to do their homework.
The tutor is like, why didn't you do their homework?
They said we were adopted from Korea and China.
The tutor is like, I don't know what's going on, but I don't think you need a tutor.
Like maybe you need something else.
So she actually, for the first time in her career, returned the money back to the dad and was like I don't know what to do.
I don't think I can be their tutor.
Whoa.
I feel like there's something so dark going on.
The father tries to argue it's because the girls don't do anything that has nothing to do with Korean culture and they only want to talk about Korea and be in Korea and be Korean.
But some people say, no, it's more than that.
Look at the dad's financial history.
The Kumar family lives in a gated community, which I would say naturally creates an environment where everyone gets to know their neighbors a lot better, unless you are the Kumars.
One neighbor says I rarely ever saw the kids and I almost never saw them interacting with other kids in the neighborhood.
I never even saw them going to school or to the park.
They were just isolated.
I don't know if they would go as far to say that they were hidden, but it does seem like there was some intentional effort being made maybe by the kids, the family or both for them not being outside.
Another neighbor says, I don't know.
They spent most of their time just confined in a single room.
We never saw them outside.
The whole family kept to themselves.
Here's why people don't think it's the girls choosing to self-isolate, though people in the neighborhood point to the fact that mr kumar used to be a very successful businessman, but he recently got into debt stock trading and ever since then he did not like interacting with people and he would do this thing where he would never hold his head high.
He would wear a face mask everywhere he went.
It doesn't matter if it's no longer covid, if it's he's not sick, if it's hot and he's Humid outside, it doesn't matter.
He's always wearing a face mask.
And it seemed like there was some sort of embarrassment laced in there.
The history of the father, Mr. Kumar, is not squeaky clean.
He's illegally married to multiple women, three women.
This is not legal.
More on that later.
But he works as a stock trader.
Unfortunately, he is one of those stock traders that would probably be the best at stock trading if he never traded.
He would probably make more money never touching the market than touching the market.
He's deep in debt.
Some reports say that he's $115,000 in debt, which would be an astronomical amount.
If you factor in in that area, the average annual salary is $5,000 to $8,000 a year.
He later claims he's not $115,000 in debt.
He says it's only about $10,000 to $20,000 US dollars, which is still a lot.
He's deep in debt.
He has to support three wives that he lives with.
He has five kids with them.
So you have the three sisters that passed.
Then you have two other children that he has to take care of.
And having multiple wives, let alone wives that are biological sisters all living together, raising kids together, is not normal.
We spoke with our Indian researcher and he says...
Yeah, it's not normal.
It's also not legal.
The sister, the wives, okay, sister wives.
I mean, they literally are sister wives.
So the grandmother, this is the sister wife's mother.
She describes it.
Well, when he was married to one sister, the other sister fell in love with him out of her own free will.
And the original sister that married him was unable to conceive for a while.
So kumar and the second sister get married with the intention of having children, but then the original sister ends up pregnant and then the other sister ends up pregnant and they're all just getting pregnant and the mother of the sister wives say i said it doesn't matter, you know, two sisters will live together and if they have a child then you know there will be a means for that too.
So she kind of believes that it's okay.
Considering the original sister was an arranged marriage with kumar, She believes you know, there wasn't a lot of love there.
It was more arranged marriage.
And then the second sister, they fell in love with Mr. Kumar.
But I still think that's really alarming.
And it seems like everyone in the area must have known what was happening in that house.
But perhaps everybody just approached the subject with not my business, not my problem.
Or maybe they thought as long as everybody's happy, who are we to judge?
But the wives were not happy.
May of 2025, two of his wives walked out and went to the police station.
And then he went to the police station to report them missing.
Eventually, they returned to the house and nothing came of it.
But this is not a family dynamic that people are jealous of.
There's clearly turmoil there.
We're not sure which of the wives walked out.
We're not sure about anything, but this is not a healthy family dynamic.
One person comments according to the Hindu Marriage Act, you can't marry another woman if your first wife is alive and you haven't divorced her.
How did this man marry multiple times and all of them are living together?
But there is an interview with the grandmother, so the sister wife's mom, and she says my daughters were good and my son-in-law was good too.
But was he?
Netizens have been skeptical of his largely unemotional appearance in all the interviews that he does.
He keeps rambling about Korean video games, Korean shows and not providing any sort of details about what happened to his daughters.
What show?
What game?
What anything?
When asked about it, he just keeps diverting the conversation.
Then a neighbor comes out to report something really odd.
They say the night of the girl's death, everyone who was awake in the apartment building heard a commotion.
Others woke each other up, but it seems like there is evidence that the father looked over the balcony first and he saw that his daughters were deceased going off of his interviews.
He freaks out, he wakes up his wife.
They head downstairs, but as they're heading downstairs, one of the neighbors is with them in the little elevator lift and all nine floors down.
It's the three of them the father, one wife we don't know which one and a neighbor.
The neighbor says it was weird.
So by this point it seems like both of them know what happened.
But the father, he's so calm, he's stoic, the whole way down and meanwhile his wife is having a more normal response.
However, she's very oddly, oddly angry at him, hitting him, screaming him, the whole way down to the ground floor.
That's really telling.
Even when they get down to the ground floor, the wife is busy trying to cover the girls with clothing, a scarf.
And neighbors report the whole time.
She would be putting a scarf over the girls and then going to hit her husband and then trying to cover the girls' faces and then going to abuse her husband.
Is how they say it.
I mean, why is she so mad at him?
But the craziest thing is, I do think it is dangerous to cast doubt or suspicion on a grieving family member, especially when in the note the girls don't address their mom at all.
So the police believe that they had a stronger connection to their dad.
So they'll write things like sorry, Papa on their note, but it doesn't make any sense.
Do we know these notes are from the girls?
It seems like it was written by them.
All of it is not adding up.
It's very odd.
And a lot of the people in India are just wondering, why are we not getting the full note then?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Because all of this is weird and it's creating a lot of hysteria.
So I was browsing on a lot of Indian subreddits and Indian netizens are saying a lot of the older generations, they're latching onto the mainstream titles of oh my gosh, phones are killing the youth which I mean.
To some degree maybe there is truth there, but not to this level.
Oh, it's a Korean video game.
A lot of people were protesting Korean media.
They were trying to protest.
Yeah, anything Korean.
A lot of older, more traditional Indian parents were saying we have to watch out for Western culture, American culture, infiltrating our youth.
And now we have to watch out for Korean culture.
Like, it's just another thing. that we have to shield our kids from.
And I get it.
I think different cultures have different aesthetics and things that we might not all approve of.
But it's just been creating mass hysteria amongst the older generations.
And then all of the younger generations are like, hey, guys, so I don't think it's that.
Something weird is happening here.
But no one wants to listen to them.
So all mainstream media talking about our Korea video games Yeah, I guess it's a more catchy title, even in the US.
It's like, can you believe these girls wanted to be Korean?
Haha, K-pop.
It's been like that vibe.
That's the energy.
That's crazy.
And I'm like, I really don't think that's at all what is happening here.
But a lot of netizens have come to some sort of conspiracy with the father.
They think either there must be some sort of abuse or at the very least severe neglect in that house to cause the girls to be at such a state in their lives.
Others are pointing to the fact that you have seen a lot of children be victims of alleged csa, who are isolated from their peers, who don't go to school, who might still have fond feelings towards their abusers, and these are all just allegations and conspiracies online which again, i would never even put in this episode had the interviews of the father not been so bizarre and just nothing makes sense.
Like if we had a theory that made sense of why the girls did what they did.
I don't even think i would even entertain such a conspiracy theory because it's i don't think it's appropriate, But nothing makes sense.
And then people thought, well, maybe the father is ashamed because of his financial state.
Maybe he mentioned marrying them off to make money for his debt.
Because why else would girls write things like oh, even the mention of marriage caused tension in our hearts.
Yeah, I can see that.
Yeah.
And maybe they don't hate their dad.
They just don't like the idea of getting married.
So that's why they wrote sorry Papa, like you can't pay off your debt because we're just going to.
But would that not be included in the letter?
I don't know.
There are netizens speculations that perhaps the dad threatened to marry them off and took their phone, disconnecting them from the world.
Or some people think maybe not, because there's a part in their diary that reads you try to make us give up Korea.
Korea was our life.
You expected our marriage to an Indian and that can never happen.
So some people are saying well, maybe the girls had brought up one day I'm going to grow up and marry someone Korean and the dad did whatever dads do, which is like no, you're not, you're gonna marry an indian man.
And he didn't even think about it.
And the girls took this to heart and they started internalizing all of this information and that made them super depressed.
But i feel like that's a very weird theory.
So, as of right now, police have stated that they will be furthering the investigation to try and find What, if any, apps were being used by the girls on their phones.
The problem is the father sold their phones, both of their phones, to make up for his debt.
So they have to track down the phones and then try to run forensics on them, see if they were talking to anybody encouraging them to do what they did.
But their deaths so far have been ruled a self-exit.
The sister's grandma on the mom's side states, I'm in a lot of grief.
I feel like, how did this happen to us?
This should not have happened.
Our granddaughters were very good, very nice, educated too.
Our girls were good.
They loved me a lot.
They loved grandfather and aunt.
They loved everyone.
She says, whenever she would visit, the three sisters would surround her on the bed and hold her close until all of them fell asleep.
And while a lot of netizens feel sympathy for the kumar family, some want the parents, especially the dad, to be investigated.
They don't think that he might have outright killed his daughters, but they think that there's way more to the story.
One comment reads i hope the father was arrested for sheer neglect.
Another comment reads this whole case is shady.
I don't believe for a single second.
They killed themselves over kpop.
That seems like some made-up bs.
The father made up.
He was married to three women and pulled his daughters out of school and kept them at home.
Nothing about their lives was normal.
Another commentator writes the dad is weird.
He lied to the media about the kpop angle.
He created a distraction to evade the situation.
Anyone who thought it could really be because of a game was misled by the media.
And that is where we are right now with the case of the kumar sisters.
What are your thoughts on this case?
So shady, yeah.
Everything about it just doesn't make sense.
And everyone who keeps coming out is i mean the dad mainly, who keeps giving his version of why the girls did it.
It just reminds me so much of the novel virgin self-exit, because it's like i don't even think he knew his own daughters.
None of this makes sense.
If you've ever been like a 12 14, 16 year old girl, none of this really makes sense, Yeah.
Even the fact that just they're not in school for five years.
I mean, that's the biggest red flag.
Yeah.
Come on.
What are your thoughts?
Leave it in the comments.
Stay safe.
And I will see you in the next one.
