There are some people who don't like private detectives. Delhi’s leading celebrity divorce lawyer got sniffy about introducing me to one, and my top cop friend said he runs a mile from these characters.
Call them gumshoes, sleuths, Sherlocks or snoops, mythologize them in countless comic strips and pulp fiction -- but when you want to know whether you're marrying a suitable boy or who your wife’s been cuckolding you with, Delhi’s shadowy subculture of private investigators provides succor.
Ashok Bhalla the 65-year-old owner of a large and flashy security agency, operates at the very top of the heap, heading a kind of super-cruiser surveillance and protection outfit. Mahesh Sharma, a freelance agent, sniffs around at the grubby bottom end. Some names missing for personal security and identity reasons.
Between the two of them, I acquaint myself with Delhi’s heart and all that keeps it awake at night.
"About 80 percent of the clients who hire us to do a check on their finances only want us to verify
their bank balances, property titles and assets.
Adding that, "in the past it was not so. Families were more interested in getting character checks done."
Is he really a man?
"I am often asked to verify the claims of NRI males who come to India looking for brides,” Major Bhalla says.
“In most of these cases, the parents of the girls are more concerned about their potential son-inlaw’s salary and Green Card status rather than whether he’s been married before or if he’s a wife beater,” she says sadly.
According to my three sleuthing pals, Delhi’s Gujarati and Marwari communities are most likely to seek their services for background checks in marriage matters.
But besides the mercenary, a few other pre-marriage concerns do crop up occasionally.
Major Bhalla says that he’s been asked to verify if a suitor had had a sex change.
HIV records are also sought surreptitiously, and of late, men are constantly being checked for homosexual, (“buggering,” he says) bisexual and substance abuse tendencies.
Is she a meat-eater?
Women get away easier, Major Bhalla maintains.
“Very few families expect the brides to be virgins these days," Bhalla says.
"We are asked more often to find about nightlife activities, reputation and if there have been abortions and how they will affect the fertility potential," he says.
Shirke says he’s been asked to check if a potential bride who claimed she was vegetarian was indeed so.
"A lot of the families who engage me to investigate marriage partners reside as joint families in traditional vegetarian households," he explains.
Can you handle the truth?
Major Bhalla claims that he has been called upon to obtain DNA testing for kids’ inheritance claims, and again emphasizes the mercenary nature of people’s concerns these days.
"The monetary stakes are so high if a marriage collapses," Major Bhalla says.
"We’ve even had instances when both the husband and wife have approached us to snoop on each other,” he laughs.
Major Bhalla claims that though a lot of her married clientele are convulsed about infidelity and adultery, in many cases she has acted more as a marriage counselor than anything else.
"Once I had a case where a 68-year-old woman was very agitated because she suspected her 74-year-old husband was having an affair that she hired me to investigate,"
"And sure enough I found that he was having an affair with a relative, but I knew in all other respects he was a caring husband so I reported to her that her suspicious were unfounded."
"At that age, what was the point of rocking her marriage?" Major Bhalla asks, flashing a pleased-with herself smile.
Darker issues and stigma
Besides the vexatious matter of marriage, the other instances when Delhi & Mumbai seeks detective Intervention is its many cases of child molestation.
"In most of these cases, it’s an in-house job with either a close relative or a trusted servant being the offender.”
And how does Delhi deal with the stigma attached to private investigators?
After all, there was a time when this tribe -- along with psychiatrists and cosmetic surgeons were an Indian girl’s best-kept secret.
Shirke is most forthcoming about the stigma.
“People are afraid to come to us,” he says. "Because they are insecure about what we will find Once they open up their lives to us.”
"And what’s more, a lot of my tribe turn to blackmail,” he adds regretfully.
But Bhatt and Major Bhalla concur that business has never been so good.
“With the city’s cosmopolitan nature increasing and so many new people coming in, the days when people knew everything about each other are gone.”
"Today we are the only ones who know the whole truth about people. And that truth either brings people together or breaks them apart," she concludes.
Forensic Detective
812-A Ansal Bhawan-16 Kasturba Gandhi Marg
Connaught Place, New Delhi-110001
E. Mail:inq.forensicdetectives.in
