Wedding Sleuths Find Their Niche
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 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.
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Photo by Emily Wax.
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