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In Thriving India, Wedding Sleuths Find Their Niche
Bhavna Paliwal of New Delhi is one of a growing number of private detectives being hired by Indian brides to vet their suitors. (By Emily Wax -- The Washington Post)
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By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 23, 2008; Page A01
NEW DELHI -- Like a lot of young Indian couples, they met on a matrimonial Web site and within a matter of weeks were picking out the wedding invitations, reserving the horse-drawn carriages and having the bride fitted for a pearl- and gold-encrusted sari.
Judging by his online profile, the groom was suitable and eager to be a good spouse: a quiet, stay-at-home kind of guy who never drank and worked as a successful software engineer. Perfect, thought the bride, a shy 27-year-old computer engineer.
Too perfect, according to Bhavna Paliwal, one of India's wedding detectives, who are being hired here in growing numbers to ferret out the truth about prospective mates.
"These days, you need to check the facts. And in India, it's the servants who will tell you 100 percent everything," Paliwal, 32, said in her office, located in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood of New Delhi. "The key is talking up the drivers, the cooks and the housekeepers. They are busybodies and aren't afraid to tell you."
In the case of the computer engineer, Paliwal found out that the 29-year-old groom-to-be had been less than honest. He had been having an affair with his housemaid. He spent many of his "quiet" nights straddling barstools around town, drinking heavily. There were signs he could be prone to violence, having been in an altercation that left him with a knife wound on his stomach.
As far as Paliwal was concerned, he was busted. The marriage was called off.
In India, hiring a wedding detective such as Paliwal has become a common prenuptial ritual, as important as the heavy wedding gold and the multi-cuisine 10-course meal served on plates coated in rosebuds.
Private sleuths have been in business here for several years, but today their services are more crucial than ever. As India's middle and upper classes grow, so too do the dowries given to grooms by brides' families. Those dowries, in turn, have boosted the incentive for fraud.
Prospective grooms frequently breeze in from as far away as the United States, marry, then rush back home with the spoils, leaving behind what have become known as "abandoned brides." Meanwhile, here at home, young Indian couples who meet over the Internet are getting away with lies that the village gossip would once have exposed.
"When people meet over our site, we strongly recommend a private detective to get all the background when you have a potential bride living in, say, Bangalore and a groom living in Hyderabad," said Anupam Mittal, founder of Shaadi.com, an Internet portal that celebrated its millionth match last year. Shaadi is the Hindi word for marriage.
"Our country and culture is changing at warp speeds," he said. "We are dispersed all over our own country and all over the world. The private detective has now become just another part of India's vast wedding industrial complex."
With an estimated 30,000 brides being abandoned every year, usually by husbands living abroad, India's Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs also recommends that families hire private detectives to vet suitors and avoid being conned into giving away dowries, which are officially outlawed here but are still common among the wealthy. The ministry estimates that hundreds of thousands of brides are lied to or misled each year.
Pandit Ram Gopal Atrey, the head priest at Old Hanuman Mandir temple, one of thousands of neighborhood temples in New Delhi, has seen it happen often.
"We have 50 cases a year of brides being duped. This never was the case in the past," Atrey said. "When this happens, it's like an act of terrorism in the life of the girl and her family. They are shamed and left with nothing after the dowry is paid."
For Paliwal, the worst part of the investigations is breaking the news.
Recently, she had to reveal the truth to the computer engineer. The solidly built detective sat the would-be bride down in the back of her office with a box of tissues. First, she showed her the photographs: the groom partying at nightclubs, hard liquor sloshing in his glass, flirty cocktail waitresses lingering at his table. Then she showed her the worst of it: the housemaid's tearful videotaped confession that she was having an affair with the groom.
"Better luck next time" was Paliwal's hardened way of consoling the shattered young woman.
Paliwal, along with other detectives from her agency, spent days befriending the intended groom's maid and videotaping her with a spy cam. Paliwal was undercover when she chatted up the maid, telling her she was looking to open a business in the area.
"The bride was so upset, but we might have saved her from a lifetime of misery," Paliwal said as she fielded a call from another prospective client. "You don't want to wait till marriage to know the real picture."
The bride-to-be, who was so humiliated she didn't want to be named, said she was devastated and entered therapy. "But without their investigations, I would be dealing with these truths in my daily life," she said.
The investigation involved a team of four female detectives, led by Paliwal. Since it was a rush job and included the use of high-tech recording equipment, Paliwal's agency charged about $1,200.
But the bride's brother, Prem Sharma, said what the agency found out was worth every rupee. "We would have been lost without our lady detective. This was not the right boy for my sister," he said.
Paliwal said being a wedding detective has turned out to be her dream job. In college, she studied to be an investigative journalist but then found herself spending too much time on routine stories for a neighborhood newspaper.
She learned of some reporters who had become crime sleuths, a common move in India because the police are so understaffed. She then applied for a job at a private eye agency she had heard was hiring. Today, her boss is Pradeep Sharma, a retired intelligence officer who said he's been impressed with female street detectives.
"Women can really get an in with the female maids, and they are often smarter about body language and clues than men are," said Sharma, who looks the part of a detective with his standard Indian mustache and haircut. "We want to blend, and Paliwal and our 11 female detectives do that so well."
Paliwal says she uses a combination of technology -- six cellphones, three spy cameras and five voice recorders -- and good old-fashioned gumshoe reporting to do her job. She likes to wear all black when incognito and a simple sari when chewing the fat with the neighborhood busybodies. She is addicted to detective novels that involve crimes of passion.
Common deceptions her sleuthing has turned up include cases of prospective grooms being already married or gay and others lying about their wealth or character.
The job can be dangerous. Once, Paliwal rescued a young girl who had been abducted and appeared set to become not a bride, but a sex slave.
"I kicked down the door and rescued the stolen girl," Paliwal said, looking fierce. "I wasn't scared. I was happy to help."
She also appreciates the investigations that don't turn up any dirt -- about 70 percent of her cases.
"Love sometimes works," she said, laughing. "That makes me happy."
Paliwal is married but never hired a private detective to investigate her own groom-to-be. Standing outside her office in front of her motorcycle, she explained why.
"Back then, I didn't know about such services," she said.
23 Feb 2008, 10:07 am
Here's my question: Why marry when you're not ready? Profiles can be faked or is that not understood? You have to meet the person first and see where things go. But then again if these rules were followed wedding sleuths wouldn't be needed.
