Hello everyone, welcome back to Kahani Suno with Kabir and Sara. I am Kabir and if you are joining us for the first time, first of all, welcome. We are very happy you are here. Second of all, please go and listen to episode 1 first. I will wait. It's not very long but what happens in that episode matters a great deal for what I am about to tell you. For those of you who were here last week, hello again. I've been thinking about Arjun all this while. I suspect some of you have been too. When we left him, he was sitting alone in the dark in his Shimla clinic with a genetic report on his screen that said in the polite clinical language that science uses when it has no other words. That he did not come from anywhere. No lineage, no ancestors, no match in any database, anywhere in the world. And he had decided I am going to go looking. Now I want to say something before we begin because I think it matters. What Arjun does in this episode is something most of us would not do. Most of us, if he found an impossible result on a test would find a reason to dismiss it. The database was wrong. The sample was contaminated. I am tired. I am not well. This cannot be what it looks like. Arjun does not do this. He's a doctor. He follows the evidence and what the evidence leads him to is something I'm not sure any of us are truly prepared for. This is episode 2, The Forbidden Truth. He submitted his blood to two more databases, International Ones, a European Ancestry Consortium, a global research repository used by universities across 12 countries. He used a different name each time. He paid with a prepaid card he bought at a chemist shop. The results came back in 10 days. Both of them. No match, no lineage, nothing. He sat with this for three days before he told Shweta. What if I told you, he said one evening very carefully, that according to a scientific analysis, three scientific analysis actually, I don't have human ancestors, that my DNA doesn't match any lineage in any database anywhere. Shweta put down her chime. I'd say databases have gaps. She said, there are whole communities in India who have never been sampled. Do you know that? I thought that too. That's why I used international databases. Then a pause. Arjun, she said, you sound like someone who had been through a trauma and is looking for a narrative that makes sense of the pain. That's not a criticism. It's human. You might be right, he said, but I'm going to check anyway because I'm a doctor and that is what I do. He went back to the city. He went first to the address the legal advisor had given him in the hospital, the apartment where his things had supposedly been packed and stored after the accident. The street was real. The building number was real. He stood outside and looked at the space where the building should have been. There was a parking lot. He checked the address three times against the document in his head. He walked around the block. He asked the man selling cigarettes from a cart on the corner. How long the parking lot had been here? 10 years at least, the man said. Before that, it was a bank. Never an apartment building? The man looked at him. No, by never an apartment. He called Anil. I'm at the address, the one you gave me in the hospital, the one you said you helped me pack up from. A pause on the line, not a short one. Which address? Anil said. I'm not sure I remember the exact street. You were the one who gave it to me. I wrote it down the same day. Your memory of that time might be, I wrote it down. Arjuna said again very quietly, I have it right here. Another pause, longer this time. Come home Arjun. Anil said. Don't do this to yourself. The call ended. Arjun stood in the parking lot and looked at the space where his pass was supposed to be. He went to the medical college, the one that had supposed to have shaped seven years of his life. The building was real, beautiful, actually colonial area, stone with a wide central staircase and examination boards in the lobby going back decades. He stood in the lobby and felt something, not quite memory but the ghost of one, an echo of a place that should have meant something. The records office was a small room at the end of a corridor that smelled of old paper and correction fluid. A clerk with reading glasses on a chain sat behind a counter stacked with registers. I am trying to confirm my own enrolment. Arjun said. He gave the year, he spelled his name twice. The clerk checked, checked again, brought out a second register. I am sorry sir, there is no student by that name in this period. Are you certain about the year? Quite certain. Let me check once more. A third register, the clerk's finger moved down the column slowly. Names and roll numbers, a whole cohort of people who had been real students. No, I am sorry, you are not here. Thank you, Arjun said. That's all I needed to know. He walked out in the courtyard and sat on a bench under a large tree and thought carefully about what he now knew. He did not exist in the college records. His apartment had never existed. His friends and aunts that were rehearsed but could not improvise. His DNA matched no known human lineage. His documents were perfect, his degrees were worn and stamped and thoroughly convincing. His bank account had a plausible history. Thinking about this constructed life was meticulous. And that, he realized, was the most frightening thing of all. Not the gaps, the perfection. Because real lives are never this tidy. Real lives have no sense and contradictions and things that don't quite add up. Only manufactured things are perfect. Arjun had manufactured him alive and he needed to know why. He was back in Shimla, seeing patients, a boy with a sprained wrist, an elderly woman with blood pressure climbing too high for comfort. When he heard footsteps, he recognized a particular rhythm, confident but unhurried. He looked up and there was Dr Abhishek in the doorway of his clinic, hands in his pockets, wearing the careful smile. You've been asking questions, Abhishek said. Come in, said Arjun, sit down. They sat across from each other at Arun's small desk and Arjun made chai. Because making chai is what you do in India when the conversation is going to be difficult, it gives your hands something to do and he waited. How much do you know? He asked. More than I can tell you, Abhishek said. Less than you need. Try. What came out slowly and with many pauses was not a complete explanation. It was more like a man describing a room he had only ever seen through a keyhole. There were people, entities, Abhishek called them that, entities and would not use any other word. Who placed people into lives with documentation, with histories, with assigned relationships. He did not know where these people came from, from the past, from the future, from somewhere else entirely. He did not know what was being studied or extracted or observed. He only knew his own role to monitor, to supply, to ensure the subjects were functioning as intended. And you? Arjun said. Are you pleased too? Abhishek was quiet for a moment. I think so. Yes. And you just accept it? The ones who didn't accept it, Abhishek said, are not here anymore. Not dead exactly. Just gone. One day they were asking questions and the next day nobody remembered they had existed. He looked at Arjun steadily. I am telling you this not to frighten you. I am telling you because you deserve to know what the stakes are. Does Shreeta know? Arjun asked. No. A pause. She is real, Arjun. She found you on her way. That was not arranged. Abhishek stood to leave at the door. He stopped. Whatever you are, he said, whatever any of us are, you have a cleaning. You have patients who need you. You have done good work here. That is real. Even if the rest of it isn't. She looked at Arjun for a long moment. Please be careful. The door closed. The clinic was quiet. Outside the mountains held their position against the sky. Wast and entirely indifferent to the smallness of what had just been said inside this room. He did not sleep much that night. He lay awake and thought about his patients. The boy with sprained wrist who had come in with his mother and been terrified and then be reassured. The old woman with the blood pressure, the child with the calf who had recovered over three weeks of treatment. He had helped them. His hands had known what to do. Whatever he was made of, whatever the origin of the knowledge in those hands, it had been real when it mattered. He thought about Shreeta. She had found him on her own. That was not arranged. He thought. He thought maybe Abhishek is right. Maybe the origin does not matter as much as what you do with the life you have been given. Even a manufactured life can be filled with real things. He almost believed it. The next morning was clear and cold. The kind of Shimla morning that makes you feel like the world has been washed overnight and put out fresh. He walked to the clinic, unlocked it, made chai, sat at his desk. He was reading a patient's file when he heard the gate outside swing open. A familiar sound, a familiar rhythm of footsteps on the gravel path. Shreeta. He looked up as the door opened. She came in smiling, holding a bag. Breakfast probably. She had a habit of bringing things. And for a fraction of a second, their eyes met across the small room. And in the fraction of a second, something happened. Not pain. She would not describe it as pain. It was more like clarity. The way a picture suddenly comes into focus. The way a word you could not remember finally arrives. He felt something resolved inside him. The way a long-held question resolves when the answer finally comes and the answer is both simpler and stranger than you expected. He understood something. At the very last moment, he understood. And then he was gone. Shreeta stood in the doorway. The bag of breakfast was still in her hand. The chai on the desk was still steaming. She would spend a long time in the years that followed, trying to describe what she had seen in his face in that last fraction of a second. It was not fear. It was not grief. It was something closer to recognition. As if he had finally, at the very end, found what he had been looking for. She would decide, eventually, that that was enough. It would have to be. There was no medical explanation of what happened to Arjun. The post-mortem found nothing. The file was quietly closed. Dr. Abhishek attended the crevation and said very little. Anil and Bhaskar came and went without making eye contact with anyone. Shreeta was the one who stayed. Here is what she came to believe in the years that followed, not because anyone told her, but because it was only version of even she could carry without it breaking her. He had been sent here from somewhere with the purpose she could not name. He had done his work, the patients he treated, the samples he collected, the steady and careful presence he offered to everyone around him. He had been a good doctor in a place that needed one. He had been in the only way that mattered, a good person. And when the task was complete, he had simply been called back. She thought about the moment in the doorway, the things she had seen in his face. She thought he knew. In the last moment, he knew everything and it was not only grief, she thought. I hope wherever he went, they told him. Somewhere in this crowded world, there are people moving among us whose histories do not quite check out, whose paperwork is suspiciously perfect, who are impossibly good at things they have no memory of learning, who arrived fully formed into lives that were built for them. You have probably passed one on a street. You may have spoken to one today. Think about it the next time a stranger is kind to you. Not every face in this world grew slowly into itself. Some of them were simply placed there. Like a piece on a board, in a game whose rules we don't know and given just enough of a story to walk through yours. It may be just maybe the placement was not the point. Maybe what mattered was what they did while they were here. So, this was our story, the forbidden truth. Arjun, a doctor who healed people with hands he could not remember training, who loved the moment he had not been assigned. He pulled at the thread of his own existence all the way to its end and who in that last moment in a small clinic in Shimla finally understood. I've been sitting with this story for a long time and the thing that stays with me, the thing I cannot shake is not the sci-fi of it. It is not the mystery of where he came from or where and who placed him there. It's Shweta, standing in the doorway with a bag of breakfast in her hand. Before she proved that something in this story was real, she was not arranged. She found him on her own and that in a story full of manufactured things is the one thing nobody manufactured, the one thing that actually happened. I think about that sometimes how in a world full of constructed narratives, the ones we are told, the ones we tell ourselves, love finds its own way in any way without permission, without a plan in whatever life we happen to be living real or otherwise. Now you might be wondering, did Arjun ever truly find his answers? Do we know where he came from? Do we know who placed him there and what they were looking for? We don't. And maybe that is exactly the point because this, my friends, is the forbidden truth, but a truth that was lost, not a truth that was forgotten, a truth that was deliberately, carefully, permanently kept from being told. Arjun got close, closer than anyone before him and the moment he reached for it, he was gone. This is not a coincidence. This is a warning. Some truths are forbidden not because they are too complicated to explain, but because the people who hold them have decided that you and I were never meant to know. And as long as that is the case, the truth stays exactly where they wanted. Hidden, save, forbidden. Dosto, this has been the forbidden truth, a Kahanisuno with Kabir and Sara, original written and narrated by yours truly. If this story stayed with you and I hope it did, please share it with someone. Word of mouth is how stories survive. It always has been. Subscribe to Kahanisuno with Kabir and Sara wherever you listen. And if you want to reach us, to tell us what you thought to suggest a story to argue with me about the ending, you can find us on www.kahanisuno.com. Until next time, apna kayaal rakhiye, take care of yourself and be kind to strangers. You never know where they came from and you never know what truth they were sent here. I am Kabir, goodnight.
