48 marieclaire.com.auabout people. It was like a hobby. When
I was a student it took me 30 minutes
to get across campus because I stopped
to get the gossip from everyone I met.”
Dubbed “Delhi’s Nancy Drew” by
the Hindustan Times newspaper,
demand for her services is booming.
She receives 80–100 calls a week from
potential clients, mostly about matters
relating to love and marriage.
Many of Khatri’s clients are women
who want to find out if their partners
are cheating, or are keen to know if a
prospective husband has any deal-
breaking habits. “Indian women are
becoming much more independent,
with their own jobs and social lives,”
she says. “They don’t want to tolerate
men who deceive them or who don’t
meet their expectations.”
Hiring a detective not only
empowers women to take control of
their lives, she adds, it also helps them
to avoid mistakes in the first place.
After two recent background checks on
potential spouses, both her clients
broke up with their boyfriends after
she discovered that one man’s maths
skills were so bad he couldn’t count
bank notes, and the other had lied
about his family home having an indoor
toilet (it didn’t, as Khatri learnt when
she pretended to be lost in the
neighbourhood and asked to use it).
Khatri’s fees start at around 25,000
rupees ($500) for cases taking under
10 days, up to 500,000 rupees($10,000) for investigations that span
months, usually corporate fraud or
missing persons. Because the
profession isn’t legally recognised – the
authorities tolerate such work as long
as detectives don’t break any laws, such
as illegally obtaining phone or email
records – there are no signs outside her
businesses. Most clients find her online
or through newspaper advertisements.T
he headquarters for Venus
Detective is on the third
floor of an office block in a
business park in Noida, an
industrial-corporate “mini city” on the
outskirts of the capital. Khatri’s youth-
ful team monitor their work on laptops.
“Everything is digital these
days,” says Khatri. “To pro-
tect our clients’ privacy,
we don’t keep any physical
evidence lying around.”
There’s rarely any
shortage of evidence. In
around 40 to 50 per cent
of premarital cases, for
example, the person Khatri
is investigating has
fabricated or concealed some details
about themselves – in the rush to join
India’s increasingly prosperous middle
class, it’s tempting for some people to
fake a few things to meet the right
spouse. “They lie about their education,
their health, their assets, even their
height,” she says. “On the internet, you“Indian
women don’t
want to
tolerate men
who deceive
them”can be anyone you want to be.” In
infidelity cases, there are practical
reasons to have hard evidence of
wrongdoing. “If a client has an arranged
marriage, the families on both sides are
involved and it’s difficult to divorce or
separate without causing a major
dispute,” explains Khatri. “But if the
client can say, ‘Look, my partner has
been unfaithful and here are the photos
and hotel receipts to prove it,’ the
families cannot argue with them.”
Some also lie about their caste –
India’s ancient social hierarchy rooted
in the Hindu religion. “Caste is critical
to some traditional families,” says
Khatri. “I get many calls from parents
who are worried their offspring are
dating someone from a
lower caste. Even if the
couple is deeply in love, the
family will stop at nothing
to break up the romance.”
Sometimes parents ask
Khatri to snare their son or
daughter’s partner in a
“honey trap” to provide fake
evidence the partner is
unsuitable. “I always refuse,”
she says. “I draw the line at anything
unethical.” Others deceive on a much
grander scale. Khatri and her staff call
these “Oh, my God [OMG]” cases. She
gives a recent example of an Indian
couple who were based in America.
“The wife hired me to find out why her
husband was spending so long back inWorld report
Chetana Mittal, 30, has gone
undercover as a maid and
a cosmetic saleswoman to get
information (above and left).
Below: Tanya Puri, 23, worked
her first case when she was 18.