Naina G thought the stars were finally smiling down on her when she crashed—literally—into Deep* at a bookstore.
At 37, after a decade of being set up (by family, friends, colleagues, and agencies); swiping (drunkenly, determinedly, dejectedly); and subscribing (for better matches, previews, stricter vetting, and virtual ‘passports’ to greener pastures), she was feeling a little jaded about the dating pool. It felt like she’d met every tech bro, wannabe LinkedIn influencer, venture capital worshipper, and eager ESOPs counter that Bengaluru had to offer. And she had traded in every last vestige of her dignity in the process.
Which is why meeting Deep had to be divine intervention, her friends agreed, two parts pleased, one part envious. They were the kind of perfect that made up hope-filled urban legends. The VP who fell in love with the CFO. Both ambitious, articulate, independently wealthy, and age-appropriate, and in sync on what they wanted the future to look like: marriage within a year, a child within three. Two homes and a vacation villa. So, it seemed perfect when three months in, they were living together. He proposed six months later in Paris, with a pair of vintage Louboutin Pensée pumps. “I remember feeling this weird mix of euphoria and dread. He was everything I had ever wanted in a man. And yet, he was so perfect that I kept thinking, what’s the catch? I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Naina tells me.
And then it did.
Unbeknown to Naina, 2,000 kilometres away, in Delhi, her mother had hired a private investigator to dig into Deep’s past. Six weeks and ₹6 lakh later, the PI’s dossier on the man of her dreams made Naina’s world cave in—an uninvestigated rape rumour from his university days; an estranged younger cousin who claimed he had abused her over the course of her school vacations one summer; voice recordings of an ex-girlfriend who claimed he was addicted to porn. All circumstantial and hearsay, but all painting a horrifyingly consistent picture. “I didn’t want to believe any of it at first. It was the ugliest fight we’d ever had,” Naina admits. “I said unspeakable things to mom—that her own failed marriage to my dad had made her bitter and paranoid.”
A week later, Naina confronted him. “I FaceTimed him while he was travelling. Even up to that point, a part of me believed, or hoped, that this was all just a horrible misunderstanding. But he hung up without answering any of my questions and I never heard from him again—not even to collect his stuff from the apartment.”
As dating and goal-oriented matchmaking go online, an increasing number of women, men, and their families are turning to professionals to vet potential partners for problematic pasts or misrepresented presents.
“Matrimonial background checks make up about 50 to 60 per cent of our business,” says Naman Jain, MD of Sleuths India Detectives. “In the 28 years since we’ve been in the business, our monthly case load on this front has increased about 10 times.” Tanya Puri, CEO of Lady Detectives India, has a similar clientele. “Families asking for background checks make up about 50 per cent of my practice, which has grown about five times in the last 11 years. Earlier, clients insisted on male detectives. Now I get a call because I’m a woman.”
India is, without doubt, an overwhelmingly arranged-marriage country. A widely quoted 2018 statistic based on a survey of 1,60,000 families is that 93 per cent of participants had arranged marriages. What’s changing radically, though, is the prospective couples’ involvement. While once such marriages were brokered by elders based on financial, communal, and caste considerations, increasingly, couples-to-be, especially in the metros, insist on intellectual and emotional compatibility.
“We are definitely seeing an uptick in the number of folks approaching us for background checks for their own peace of mind, without involving the families,” says Puri. “Mostly before they say yes to a marriage alliance, but we’re also seeing this trend grow while dating, given how easy it is to dupe on dating apps and social media.”
The scope of these checks can be as extensive as the appetite of the client. Basic hygiene checks include verifying details such as age, occupation, family businesses and alliances, property, ownership, salary levels, loans, financial health, liabilities, assets, past relationships, broken marriages or engagements, and feedback on the temperament, behaviour, and social standing of the prospective partner and their families. Deep background checks may call for extensive travel to all the cities and countries that the subject has lived in, physical surveillance, and even going undercover to suss out anything that appears even faintly dodgy. Depending on the comprehensiveness of the assignment, an investigation can cost anywhere between ₹25,000 to a staggering ₹25 lakh and take 10 days to six months with the help of two to 12 agents.
A crucial variable in how much an investigation can end up costing is its intended purpose. “In divorce cases, the evidence we gather needs to clear the legal bar for it to be useful to our client. What we gather—photos, videos, documents, etc—and how we gather it has to be unchallengeable in court, all of which ends up being more expensive,” says Jain.
For ₹1 lakh, Mumbai-based Vasvi* was able to find out her girlfriend of one year was engaged to a man of her parents’ choosing. For the same money, Kajal from Lucknow could enjoy her courtship, confident in the knowledge that her fiancé was exactly who he said he was in all the ways that mattered to her. For ₹2 lakhs, Sameer Agarwal from Kolkata finally found himself with incontrovertible proof that his girlfriend was, in fact, sleeping with her male best friend and that he wasn’t a “jealous, controlling, paranoid freak” as she’d gaslighted him into believing. For ₹5 lakhs, Delhi’s Divya* learned that her fiancé’s parents were separated and that his mother had a longstanding affair with their married neighbour. For double that amount, Neha M from Singapore was able to learn that her husband was sleeping with the nanny who had accompanied them from India after the birth of their daughter. Duhita from Bengaluru paid ₹15 lakh to find that her very wealthy, very high-profile intended’s family was, in reality, drowning in debt and embroiled in multiple legal cases.
The stories are toe-curling and devastating. But they also raise uncomfortable questions of legality, ethics, and the privacy of the people involved. Also, who among us can claim to live an embarrassment-free, secret-free, skeleton-free life? If someone pokes hard enough at ancient history, eventually they’ll find a hornet’s nest. And, finally, do we have a right to move on from our past—mistaken, ugly, contentious even, if it might have been?
“Legality has very clear answers—we can’t make up something if it doesn’t exist,” says Jain. “We get daily requests from parents whose only mandate to us is to find something—anything, in whatever way possible—to help them break up their children’s relationship. But we know the legal difference between surveilling and stalking. Section 354D of the IPC defines it as following or contacting a woman despite her disinterest. In fact, legitimate, registered PI agencies will deny requests that require skirting of laws…which means only collecting evidence from public spaces and surveilling in a manner that does not constitute stalking.”
Puri is on the same page. “Reputed PIs have a strong code of personal ethics. Undercover, when needed, is okay. Entrapment is not. And violating someone’s privacy and personal space, hacking, etc is not even up for debate.”
There are no regulations or government-issued licenses for detectives in India. In 2007, the Private Detective Agencies (Regulation) Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha to ensure licensing norms and legal parameters that protect the rights of individuals, but it has not been enacted this far. Currently, anyone can anoint themselves a detective in India and operate unencumbered by clear legal boundaries.
TK* is one such operator. They spoke to me on condition of iron-clad anonymity. “What I do, no agency can—or will—do.” I want to say this is hubris, but a closer inspection of their setup proves to me it isn’t. What they do is equal parts alarming and impressive: TK has in their employ hackers, escorts, maids, drivers, pickpockets, flight attendants, waiters and housekeeping staff in hotels and restaurants, and even some minor influencers.
While deliberate entrapment is the big fat line no agency will cross, TK has no ethical conflicts with doing it. Their fee often runs into the high seven figures.
Someone I know recently used TK’s services to test her husband. It involved putting an escort in his path repeatedly and allowing a relationship—including sex—to develop over months. Through the process, she unearthed a secret phone and a clandestine affair with his own cousin. “It is perverse, but all I feel is relief,” says the client. “Sometimes, you want to know every last dirty secret there is, so you can finally stop questioning your own sanity. I don’t know what I’ll do with this piece of evidence, but I now know that my husband is a gaslighting piece of shit.”
It’s hard to ignore the million moral objections, even as I’m going through the folders full of evidence—to the prolonged seduction, the unchecked deception for sale, the immorality of the means, even if a case can be made about them justifying the ends… And then I think about the friend with the (secretly) married ex who torched three years of her life, and the friend with the (secretly) married ex who had a baby on the way with a wife hidden on a whole other continent, and the friend whose husband had a nine-year-long affair with her underage little sister. And I quietly pocket TK’s permanent number… Just in case.
*Some names have been changed upon request
