Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 18 June 2018 | Page 56

SPOUSE TRACKING
RED BRICKS
BENEATH THE
BLUE WALL
Matrimonial profile with dubious sheen?
Tech-armed sleuths can well verify it all.
Illustration by SAJITH KUMAR
by Salik Ahmad
S
ITTING in her office that’s into
an offbeat sort of detective work,
Taralika Lahiri recalls a two-
year-old case where a woman
suspected her fiancé to be gay. “I
made a Facebook profile of a
man and approached him over chat line.
He would like me to talk to him late into
the night. The nature of the conversati­
ons revealed he was homosexual,” says
the veteran, who heads National Detec-
tives and Corporate Consultants.
Yes. When it comes to a marital relation,
56 OUTLOOK 18 June 2018
Indian families these days are keen to
know about matters beyond just conven­
tional: the boy’s/girl’s personal history,
financial position, social status and caste
hierarchy, among other things. Topics
like sexual orientation and probable infi­
delity are gaining increased vitality in the
anxiety lists of alliance seekers.
In tune with their times, detectives
today are increasingly using social media
to study the subject’s behaviour and look
for clues into their past. For that, the
sleuths gather every possible bit of publi­
cly available data about the person. Here,
Facebook forms a crucial source.
That was how Rahul Rai Gupta got yet
another client. His secret agency was
asked to probe a 32-year-old Delhiite—by
her fiancé’s family from Chandigarh. The
woman was found to be on Facebook
using a different name. “We soon learned
she was a divorcee and had a seven-year-
old child,” says the detective. “These
were facts she had concealed from the
prospective groom’s family.”
Gupta has juicier stories to tell. Last
year, a 30-year-old divorcee from Delhi
thought she had found her man. She
spotted him on a matrimonial website.
He reciprocated. Both did the preliminar­