‘I'll go to prison, but not back home’: Bengaluru techie flees after wife’s ‘harassment’

A Bengaluru-based techie, who his wife thought had been kidnapped, was located walking out of a mall in Noida by the police on Thursday evening (August 15). The cops brought him back to Bengaluru on Friday morning (August 16), against his wishes.

According to his wife, the techie went missing on August 4 after he left home to visit an ATM to withdraw some cash. She filed a missing person complaint with the police, suspecting that he had been kidnapped.

After several days without news of him, his wife posted on social media that the police were not serious enough in tracing his whereabouts.

Switched off his phone

The cops could not trace the missing husband because he had switched off his phone. They checked the footage of hundreds of CCTV cameras at the airport, railway stations, and bus stands, to no avail.

Finally, the techie bought a new SIM card and inserted it in his old phone, which enabled the police to track him down to Noida. The cops said when they accosted him as he was coming out of a mall in Noida after watching a movie, he smiled at them when he realised they were policemen in plainclothes and asked “What next?”

When they told him he had to return to Bengaluru with them, he strongly objected.

‘You put me in prison, I will live there’

“You put me in prison, I will live there… but I will not return to Bengaluru,” he told them repeatedly, according to a Times of Inda report

He finally agreed when they told him that the missing person complaint filed by his wife could be closed only in his presence. After they returned to Bengaluru, the police took a statement from him and then allowed him to go home.

The techie told the police that he was being harassed by his wife. He was reportedly her second husband. She was a divorcee with a 12-year-old daughter when he met her about 3 years ago. He was a bachelor, and married her, and they had an 8-month-old daughter together.

Wife ‘curtailed his freedom’

He told the cops that his wife curtailed his freedom, told him how to dress, would shout at him if he dropped any food from his plate, and wouldn’t even allow him to go out and enjoy a cup of tea. He could not take it any longer and decided to escape to Noida. Since his wife had posted his photos online saying he was missing, the techie changed his appearance by shaving his head.

He went to Tirupati by bus, took a train to Bhubaneswar, and from there, he went to Delhi and finally landed up in Noida. But his new-found freedom lasted only for a few days before the police tracked him down to the mall in Noida.