But the most persistent among them was from a man who would call three or four times a day, urging her to meet him somewhere. When she blocked his number, he would call from another. She began to worry that he would track her down in person.

“He sounded like a creepy Indian guy to me,” Ms. Chakravarty said.

When the police traced the number, the person they found at the end of it was Premsagar Tiwari, whose given name in Hindi translates as “Sea of Love.” Mr. Tiwari, 24, turned out to be a high-strung, pencil-necked man who grew up in two small rooms in the corner of the down-at-heel government school where his father worked as a night watchman.

Outside his window, young women came and went in their crisp school uniforms. But the night watchman’s son could not approach them.

“The way he was built,” said Satyavir Sachan, the constable assigned to the case, “it didn’t seem he could talk to girls.”

Poring through Mr. Tiwari’s call records, Mr. Sachan found that he was using eight SIM cards, some registered under false names, to contact more than 500 women. The activity occupied, by police estimates, two to three hours a day.

Summoned to the police station, Mr. Tiwari confessed readily and with clasped hands he beseeched the police not to imprison him. His phone calls, he explained in an interview, should better be understood as part of his search for a soul mate.