A Suicide Note: ‘We Love Korean, Sorry Papa’

 A DUSTY, BUSTLING STREET in Delhi’s suburbs leads to a large gate of the multi-storeyed Bharat City Society in Ghaziabad district. Right from the guards at the gate, everyone knows why the media is visit­ing the complex. They immediately give out the flat number of the ninth-floor apartment from where three minor girls allegedly jumped to their deaths in the early hours of February 4, leaving a handwritten note tied to a cash memo with a butterfly clip.

By now, the note has been read, re-read and dissected. Mostly in Hindi, but written in the English script, the note, addressed to their father Chetan Kumar, titled “true life story”, revealed unmis­takably that the girls were possessed by everything Korean—its culture, drama, pop, movies, and actors. The girls—12, 14 and 16—wrote about how Korea and K-pop topped the list of their favourite things. “So, you will make us leave Korean…. Korean was our life. So how did you dare to make us forsake our lives? You did not know how much we loved them; now you can see the proof. Do you believe now that Korean and K-pop are our life? The way we loved Korean actors and K-pop groups, we did not even love our family members the same way,” it said.

A denial of their “Korean life” was an apparent reference to the father taking away their mobile phone, their link to that world. The note, which starts with “we love Korean, sorry papa” and ends with “sorry papa”, also reads that the mention of marrying an Indian gave them tension. “Liking and loving Korean and marrying a man from India? Never. We would never expect this from ourselves. That is why we committed suicide.”

Is there more to this mindboggling story? The grapevine in the lawns between the apart­ment buildings is silent, but suspicious, finding it difficult to believe what it is hearing. Life seems to be returning to normal in the residential complex—children playing in the park, older people soak­ing in the sun, and women chatting between household chores. Yet, the shadow of the suicides, etched by the police in circles drawn on the ground where the girls had fallen, right below the apartment with the sliding windows through which they are said to have jumped, lurks in the silences, in the media’s presence, in the inconceiv­ability of the extent of an obsession.

An old man, sitting on a bench in the lawn, says he knows about the case only from what is unfolding in the media. A se­curity guard says he had never seen the girls. “I don’t remember seeing the girls at any of the society events held on various festi­vals,” says Rahul Kumar Jha, joint secretary, Apartment Owners’ Association, who had rushed to the site after a security guard called to inform him that three girls had fallen from the ninth floor of a block.

There is an unsettling quiet in the dark corridor of the ninth floor, where two women are seen mopping the floor. Nobody claims to have known the family, including Chetan Kumar’s neighbours. An immediate neighbour says his family has had no contact with them. A couple of doors down the corridor, a woman speaking through the mesh door also expresses her unfamiliarity with the Kumar family, saying she has no time to socialise because she gives tuitions to children. Asked if she had also taught the three girls of Kumar’s household, she says she gave tuitions to them for just four days, soon after the family had moved in on rent, around three years ago. She gave them lessons in writing on the first day and in tables on the second day. The neighbour, who teaches around 20 fifth-grade students, realised that the girls, who had stopped going to school since Covid in 2020, would require more of her attention and decided against continuing to teach them. She returned the advance for the rest of the days to their father. Describing them as “very sweet girls”, she says it was just that she did not have enough time for them.

The Kumar family is mourning quietly inside their apartment, behind a black iron door, which has a toran—a traditional sacred hanging welcoming guests—on top and a swastika—symbolis­ing good fortune—by the side. A man wearing a mask opens the door but, as expected, refuses to talk and quickly shuts it.

The suicides, in the course of the investigations, have brought out the complexities of the relationships in the Kumar house­hold—three wives, of which two are sisters—and five children, all of whom lived in the 1,520-square-foot apartment. It was here that the girls, Nishika, Prachi and Pakhi, isolated themselves from the world outside and fabricated a make-believe space for them­selves. They even simulated names online—Aliza, Cindy and Maria—and made Ko­rean “relatives”, building a fantasy of their own through their mobile phone, a prob­able escape from the stark realities of their own lives. Going by the jottings on the suicide note, when that chimerical existence was denied to them, they sought another escape—death.

Kumar’s three marriages, however, had no direct link to the suicides, according to the police. “The girls had no interaction with society. They spent their time on a mobile phone and social media. When the family got to know, they took away their mobile phone,” says Patil Nimish, DCP, Trans Hindon, Ghaziabad.

According to Jha, inside the flat, adjoining the balcony in a 10x10-foot room where the suicide note was found on the floor among family photographs, there was nothing but a wall-fitted cupboard. A person who witnessed the scene soon after the girls jumped from the balcony says he saw the mother of one of the girls sitting next to where she lay on the ground, crying and saying something about “Korean dramas” as they waited for the ambulances to arrive. Another woman sat by a second girl, cursing God, he says. Below, the tower guard, who is taking down names of all the visi­tors, as he always does, says he does not recall seeing the girls but has seen their father with a young woman and a little child.

FOUR DAYS AFTER the suicides, the girls’ father was quoted by PTI as saying, “I used to pamper my children…. They would watch Korean dramas, reels, and play Korean games. Their eyes were swollen, which is why I took away their phones. They were angry about it. I did it for their good. Is taking your child’s phone away a sin?” He, however, refused to answer any question about his personal life.

The girls’ suicide note, which repeatedly said “Korean was our life”, gives a list of 19 items which they also loved “more than our life”. Besides “Kore­an”, it included Chinese, Thai, Japanese, American, English and Hollywood music groups, movies and BL (Boy’s Love) dramas, some specific games, like the Baby in Yellow, Ice Game and Ice Cream Man, and four cartoons. In contrast, it asserted their dislike for Bollywood.

After the note unfolded in the media, social media and on television, it triggered a debate across platforms—some sought a blanket ban on social media for chil­dren on the lines of Australia, while others demanded a ban on Korean serials. Some called it an addiction like any other, which should have been treated differently, while several people have asked why the girls were not being sent to school.

The social media ban for under 16s in Australia, the first coun­try to do so, was aimed at protecting teens from the addictive na­ture of algorithms, online harms and the impact of comparison culture. The ban applying to major platforms— Instagram, Face­book, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, X, Reddit, Threads, Kick, and Twitch—put the onus of implementing it on the tech giants. In India, the Chandrababu Naidu government in Andhra Pradesh is exploring options to impose a ban on social media for teenag­ers. LSK Devarayulu, a Telugu Desam Party (TDP) Lok Sabha MP, who has submitted a private member’s Bill seeking restrictions on under-16s from using social media platforms, says algorithms are designed in a way that children get addicted, damaging their cognitive skills. “Because of all this, children stop going out. The same thing happened with the girls in Ghaziabad. They were confined to the screen with no other avenue beyond it,” he says. His Bill seeks to require social media platforms to verify users and deactivate accounts of those under 16.

Like any such case, it raises several questions, doubts and theo­ries. Why were the girls not going to school? There are around half-a-dozen schools in the vicinity. The father has told the police that he had financial constraints and a debt of `2 crore. Under the Right to Education Act, 2009, every child in the 6–14 age group is entitled to free and compulsory education. Why were these girls confined to their home? What roles did their mothers, who did not find any mention in the suicide note, play in their lives? Did they jump together, or was one of them trying to save the other, as it reportedly appeared to an eyewitness? Did the girls convey their exasperation to the parents before taking the extreme step?

This was not a cut-and-dry case of murder, unlike that of Radhika Yadav, a state-level tennis player shot dead by her fa­ther around six months ago. This, the police said, was suicide. There are similarities in the undertones—a daughter’s (in this case daughters’) disconnect with the father, a milieu that was far removed from their dreams, a constrained life and several unan­swered questions—and stark contrasts. In Radhika’s case, the father, who had himself helped in her tennis ambitions, claimed that he faced taunts that he was living off his daughter, who coached upcoming tennis players. Radhika had her aspirations. On the other hand, in the case of the suicides of the three girls, the father, plausibly caught up in the morass of his life, seemed to have turned a blind eye to his daughters’ stargazing. When he got to know about the extent of their fetish and their social media account using fictitious names, which drew a significant follow­ing, he took away the phone and sold it, according to the police. Around 10 days later, his daughters took their lives.

Saumya Sharan, a Gurugram-based clinical psychologist, describes it as a multi-layered and unfortunate tragedy. “They were adolescents who seemed to have formed a sense of identity through compulsive screen use. From what we read, they were isolated from the rest of society, which in itself is a risk multiplier. You create an online world and start finding identity in that world, which is an unreal one. Loss of that world, particularly when there is no offline access, can lead to extreme distress.”

Gurugram-based psychiatrist Dr Ashish Mittal, who is an expert on de-addiction, feels that there were multiple stressors which pushed them to the brink and the incident cannot be pinned down to just one factor. “Believing themselves to be Koreans, it was some kind of delusion. Apart from that, there were family issues and financial stress. When there is screen addiction and that is denied, it leads to some kind of withdrawal symptoms,” he says. Asked if banning teenagers from social media was the answer, Mittal says a blanket ban can be coun­terproductive and, instead, controlled exposure to screen time should be explored.

The Ghaziabad girls have, at length, expressed their side of the story, may be bizarre, may be unimaginable. The father has asked if taking away a phone, in the child’s interest, is a sin. Everyone aware of the story has an opinion. At the end of the day, who is to blame for this tragedy? The last word, if at all there is one, is yet to be said. Like Radhika Yadav’s story, this too may fade away, leaving several questions hanging in the air.