Touch screen with secrets

Sanjay Mehra (name changed) met his first post-marriage girlfriend at a company off-site in Goa. The year was 2003. She worked in the Hyderabad office and he in Delhi and the only thing they had in common until then was group e-mails from the HR department. In Goa, in the evenings, after the day’s conference, they hung around in the infinity pool. Mehra liked her, but didn’t think much of it. He had been married then for nearly seven years, had two small kids and pretty much managed to ‘keep himself busy’ with work and home.

But a week after Goa, he was on a business trip in Mumbai, and in the hotel late in the evening, with nothing to do other than watch TV and order room service, he found himself sending text messages to the girl. “Within a week,” he says, “we were exchanging 50-60 messages a day. It was exhilarating, how easy it was to meet someone and then build a relationship mostly on the phone.” Just the SMS component of his mobile bill used to be around ₹4000.

Mehra had a Nokia handset, the one with blue light. “At home, I would put it on silent mode, but that phone had a pretty bright screen, the whole room would glow blue when a message arrived. At one point, my wife asked me why my phone was constantly buzzing at night, and I told her it was work. I’d wait for her to turn the other side, then hide the screen under the blanket and reply to the messages.” Mehra found himself getting increasingly possessive of his phone. His kids liked to play the then popular game ‘Snake’ on it, and he mostly refused. If at all he let them, he hovered around until they had played a few rounds and then snatched it back. “Overall though,” he says, “that phone was safe. If you got a message, it only said 1 message received and you’ve to hit three keys before opening it.”

Even though he was exhilarated about the freedom to text and chat privately, he was constantly cautious. He tried various options — saving her number under a company’s name, saving it in a man’s name etc — but eventually just committed it to memory and took it off the address book. The affair ran its course in 2009, but Mehra can still rattle the number off the top of his head.

That the mobile phone has been an enabler of relationships and secret trysts — of the intra- or extra-marital variety — is nothing new. What is also not surprising is the fact that infidelity in India is a trend as firmly established as that of rising smartphone sales. In a survey conducted by Ashley Madison, a website and mobile app that helps married people find lovers (slogan: life is short, have an affair), 87 per cent women and 81 per cent men in arranged marriages confessed to having had affairs. Of this, 81 per cent men and 68 per cent women said the affair had positively impacted their marriages. Like in the case of Mehra, 40 per cent of these dalliances happened on work trips, and a large majority of the relationships were workplace romances. Interestingly, 92 per cent women (as opposed to 81 per cent men) kept their relationships secret and were not caught. And of those who did not manage it, for 77 per cent men and 62 per cent women the discovery didn’t lead to divorce.

All of this is just a statistical way of saying that infidelity is here to stay, no matter how loudly people stammer “b-b-but Indian culture.” Therefore, the freedom that a mobile provides is no longer about meeting the new lover. That’s the easy part. When in doubt, Tinder. The energy of the mobile is now mostly devoted to hiding the affair. Let’s go back to Mehra. In 2012, three years after the first affair ended, Mehra met someone else. Met is technically incorrect, the girl was his junior from college, and they found each other on Facebook. Soon the occasional pings on messenger became frequent, they met for dinner once, and the sexual chemistry was so high that they went away together the very next weekend. Mehra is now the president – operations of a multi-national company and he had a top-end smartphone but the machinations of an extramarital relationship, he discovered, are harder, though cheaper, the second time around.

As per company policy, his secretary had access to his business e-mail, and in an earlier emergency he had handed over his Gmail password to her as well. He opened a second account, but found it clunky to switch between three mailing apps. His girlfriend and he exchanged photos of themselves on Snapchat, but once when his wife had access to the phone as she was following the directions on Google maps while he was driving, she asked him why he had downloaded Snapchat. In the shouting match that ensued, in which he accused her of constantly being suspicious, he insisted that she delete the app then and there, and so she did.

“The new phones are an absolute nightmare,” he says, “both Android and iOS display the first two lines of the message on screen, so even if the phone is locked someone can quickly read the text.” Then, there is the trouble with all the photos taken on the phone. Mehra has to remember to delete them from the gallery, as well as the recently deleted folder. And any photos or videos sent to him on WhatsApp also immediately become part of the gallery. “While the new smartphones allow you to take the relationship to a whole new level, and I will confess the photos and videos are a great turn-on, it is also a bit of a pain to keep it scrubbed clean,” he says. So, on the advice of a friend who was in a similar situation, Mehra too became a consumer of the multi-billion dollar high-growth industry — apps that help you cover up an affair. After many trials and errors, he has settled on two. TigerText, a messaging app in which messages self-destruct once they are read, and Vaulty Stocks, an app that allows you to store incriminating pictures and videos and is designed to look like an app that helps you manage your shares. You need a password to enter the Vault. He has deleted Facebook messenger on the phone and also disabled backing up anything to the iCloud from his iPad.

Life is better now, he says, although there is a caveat. “The only drawback, of course, is that the fear of discovery, which is half the thrill of an extramarital relationship, is considerably reduced now,” he says, “but I would rather be half-thrilled with my girlfriend and alive than murdered by my wife.”

COMMENT NOW