Bengaluru: A software engineer suspicious of his wife, had planted 22 cameras in the house in order to keep an eye on her. Additionally, he had also asked a relative of his to function as a private detective and installed spyware on his wife’s phone to check her calls, messages, and photos.

The man had initially visited the wife’s house to ask for her elder sister’s hand in marriage. But he was besotted with her instead and pursued the woman for three years before marrying her in 2010. His suspicions started a few years after marriage. He began to take leave from work in order to spy on her activities. BS Saraswati, a senior counsellor from the Women’s Helpline at the police commissionerate said: “He installed tiny spy cameras in the house, including a few in the kitchen, and linked them to an app on his phone. He was constantly watching her.”

The wife was being followed by the private detective as well as her husband itself, who used an SLR camera with a long-range lens to watch her. He tended to confront her with so-called evidence, and despite her assurance that she was not seeing anyone, he was not appeased. On her birthday, he gifted her a phone saying he had changed but had actually installed spyware on it in order to monitor her.

In April, the husband confronted his wife yet again with a photo he had taken of her with a man, unaware that the man happened to be her nephew. This was the last straw for the woman who used her son’s cricket bat to hit her husband on the head, an action for which he now blames her, as it has spoiled his looks. Despite weeks of counselling as mandated by the police, the couple has been unable to reunite and are planning for a divorce.

Suspicions of infidelity may sometimes be of delusional intensity. There have been incidents in the past which have involved delusions of infidelity, attributed to conditions such as delusional disorder, schizophrenia, and other psychotic illnesses.