Becoming a Female Private Eye
None of Indira Stamford’s friends or family knew her secret, not even Lucy and Emma. All assumed that when she left home early in the morning that she commuted to an accountancy job in London — how wrong they were.
Indira didn’t use her surname for business dealings as that would give potential for reprisals from aggrieved individuals. Instead, she used her first name and added a Ms. in front
Ms. Indira first got the idea of being a private eye when reading: The №1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, the highly popular fiction series by Alexander McCall Smith. But unlike Mama Precious Ramotswe, who uncovered all sorts of ungodly plots in Gaborone, Botswana, Ms. Indira specialized in infidelity, specifically, infidelity in the London, Indian community.
Ms Indira had researched that the social media boom was playing havoc with the Indian urban marriage, And what’s bad for one person is good for another. When men are unfaithful, her most common request to investigate, it means wives are willing to pay to find out what their cheating husbands are doing. Indeed, this business opportunity had been born from chatting over lunch one day with an acquaintance who had found out about her husband’s unfaithful ways through an infidelity detective, as those in the industry referred to themselves.
Ms. Indira had quickly analysed that a particularly lucrative niche was pre-matrimonial assignments. She would find out details about: salary, character and family status for both male and female clients. Ladies would often ask for additional information on their fiancés’ drinking, smoking, gambling and whoring habits. When needed to convince a client who was umming and ahing whether to employ her, Ms Indira would disclose, ‘My last case involved a business man, a senior level executive in a big company, who told me, “I’m having an affair with an employee, a married woman. I’m calling you because I think she’s having an affair. I want you to find who the man is.”
Ms. Indira, would use a healthy portion of artistic license when speaking to potential clients, claiming, ‘The inspiration to be an infidelity detective, came from my first marriage; I found out my husband had been unfaithful . . . through the use of a private eye.’ If Indira saw the potential client wavering, she always used the line, ‘You just somehow sense it, especially if you’ve been in a long marriage. You know your spouse better than anyone else in the world. If you have a gut feeling that something is wrong, it’s probably not the curry.’ Without failure this got a laugh, and more often than not, a down payment. She would then habitually finish her sales pitch: Life is always stranger than fiction.
While Ms. Indira certainly wasn’t the only fidelity detective in London, over the last five years she’d become the most well-known, so much so, that she was now the go-to person for the suspicious London based Indian woman. Needing to keep her anonymity, all her clients now came through her website, and which was why she has persuaded her husband to move to Whitefield; there she couldn’t accidentally be spotted by past clients or newly divorced men.
The irony that Indira was lying to her husband about her job was not lost on her, as she considered, at some time in the future I will have my day of reckoning. My husband is the suspicious sort, and maybe thinks I’m having an affair with my increasingly long and frequent journeys to London. Indira only hoped that, When that time comes, I pray it won’t ruin my marriage the same way my work has broken many hearts.
