The Lady Detectives of Delhi

Cheat on your spouse? Lie on your Tinder profile? Moonlight as a sex worker? Don’t even think about it. These unlikely spies are watching.

- Abigail Haworth

A kriti Khatri is on a stakeout in a bustling neighborhood in New Delhi. On this hot Sunday afternoon in August, shoppers are bargaining for clothes and household goods at open-front stores. Khatri buys a watermelon smoothie from a juice vendor and tucks herself against a wall to avoid the cars and motorized rickshaws clogging the street. The chaotic location is ideal. “It’s easy to blend in and secretly watch my target,” says Khatri, a private detective whose eyes, hidden behind sunglasses and a curly dark bob, are fixed on a nearby modern apartment block. “With luck, I will catch the love cheat on-camera coming out of the building with his mistress.” Khatri, 31, who exudes a mixture of fearless energy and sharp humor, is one of a growing number of Indian women taking the country’s male dominated private-eye industry by storm. She runs her own agency, Venus Detective, with offices in India’s capital, Delhi; Bangalore; and three other major cities. The sleuth and her team of 20 full-time, mostly female field agents launch daring undercover operations to expose illicit love affairs, dating fraud, corporate corruption, and other ills of modern Indian society. In the process, they turn traditional female roles upside down. “We often disguise ourselves as maids, vegetable vendors, college girls, or cosmetics saleswomen to infiltrate homes and offices,” says Khatri, who rides a motor scooter during surveillance jobs. “It’s risky, but so far we’ve never been caught. Targets rarely suspect women of being professional spies.”