marieclaire.com.au 49JACK PICONE
“Men think
I will
understand
the mindset
of their
wives”India,” she says. “We discovered he had
three other wives in this country, each
with their own house and kids that he’d
fathered.” Khatri believes the man had
married the women to get money in the
form of a dowry from each wife’s family.
(The payment of a dowry is illegal in
India, but still widely practised.)
In another “OMG case”, a woman
wanted to know why her boyfriend
kept sneaking out of the house late at
night. “He told her he couldn’t sleep
and was getting some fresh air,” says
Khatri. “It turned out he was hiring out
his sexual services for cash to an older
woman two or three times a week.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Khatri,
who is married with a two-year-old
son, says a big part of her job involves
counselling her distressed clients. “One
of the first things I ask people is
whether they’re prepared to learn the
truth, and what they intend to do with
the information we dig up,” she says.
Sometimes the answers surprise her,
like the time a woman hired her, but
said she planned to do nothing with the
proof of her husband’s infidelity. “She
told me she was just going to keep it as
insurance,” says Khatri. “In case her
husband caught her cheating on him.”
Confirmation that a spouse has
been having an affair doesn’t always
end badly, however. One of Khatri’s
clients, a 30-year-old Delhi resident
named Shweta, who does not want her
surname published, says hiring a
private detective has saved her five-
year-old marriage. “I was going through
a bad time with my husband after the
birth of our first child,” says Shweta. “I
was depressed and I missed my job in
human resources, and my husband and
I stopped communicating properly.”
Shweta began to suspect her husband
was seeing someone. “I hired Akriti
and she caught him red-handed
checking into a hotel with another
woman,” she says. “When I confronted
him with the evidence he broke down
and apologised. He has treated me like
a queen ever since.”
Being unfaithful works both ways,
of course, and growing numbers of
Khatri’s clients are men who want to
check up on their wives and girlfriends.
Whatever the gender of her clients, she
believes female private detectives havethe upper hand in dealing with their
cases. “Women feel more comfortable
telling their problems to another
woman,” she says. “While men think
that I will understand the mindset and
behaviour of their wives.”
Baldev Puri, general secretary of the
Delhi chapter of the Indian Association
of Private Detectives and Investigators
(APDI), agrees. “They make excellent
investigators, in many cases far superior
to men,” says the veteran detective, who
has run his own agency for 30 years.
“They are highly perceptive, they know
how to get access in every situation, and
they’re very organised.” Of the 350
agencies that are APDI members,
around 15 are owned and run by women,
he says, up from “only three or four
nationwide” a few years ago.
Puri is such a champion of female
sleuths that he encouraged
one of his two daughters to
join the business. At 23,
Tanya Puri is the youngest
female private eye in the
country to run her own
agency, Lady Detectives
India. “I started working
with my father from around
the age of 15, and discovered
I had a talent for obser-
vation and recalling details,” says Tanya.
She landed her first big case when
she was an 18-year-old college student.
“My father was asked to investigate a
female student whose parents thought
she was seeing someone in secret,” she
says. “It was easier for me to follow her
without being noticed, so I took thejob.” Tanya tailed the girl on Delhi’s
metro and by rickshaw, and was
shocked to find that she was working in
a high-class brothel. “She looked the
same as me so I didn’t expect her to be
involved in some kind of sex racket,”
she says. “It was an early wake-up call
never to make assumptions.”
Despite spending their days on^
the frontline of India’s murky world
of romantic lies and deception,
both women say they still believe in
love. Tanya is engaged to a young
Delhi lawyer who is proud that she’s
a private detective. “He thinks it’s
exciting and boasts about it to all
his friends,” she says.
As for Khatri, she and her husband,
who she married at a “big fat Indian
wedding”, have been married for five
years. “When I was single, my
grandmother told me to lie
about my job to find a
husband. She said that
being a private detective
was too threatening to
men,” she laughs. But
Khatri knew from
experience that lying was
unwise. She told the truth,
and it paid off. “He has no
problem with my job,” she
says of her husband, who is a banker.
In the near future, Khatri hopes to
open India’s first school for female
private detectives. “Some people think
this is not suitable work for women,”
she says. “We’re proving them wrong.
It’s the kind of job that shows women
can be anything we want to be.”Agencies, such as Khatri’s
Venus Detective, investigate
anything from premarital
checks to corporate fraud.
The profession isn’t legally
recognised so signage tends
to be discreet (above).