From pre and post-matrimonial investigations, blackmails, anonymous calls, missing persons to teenage monitoring, AM Malathi, the first woman detective in South India, has handled them all with more than 15,000 cases to her credit in her two-decade-old career. She calls herself as “bold and daring” and loves her profession, as it provides fresh challenges and new experiences every day. She is the owner of Malathi Women Detective Agency, which was formed to cater to female clients who would be uncomfortable sharing their grievances with men detectives. “My staff strength is 10, including four women detectives,” says Malathi. “As women have limitations of working late at night, or going to a pub, we also have male staff. But we call it a women’s detective agency because we wanted to make female clients more comfortable in sharing their problems,” explains this engineering graduate. Malathi’s entry into this field was accidental. In 1989, she approached Star Detective to investigate a sub-letting property dispute her father was involved in and then ended up chipping in for the investigation. She later joined as a part-timer in that agency. In 1993, she got married to Arul Manimaaran, the owner of Star Detective, and joined her husband in his work. In 1999, she started her women’s agency.“We receive more matrimonial cases, nowadays, because there’s too much influx of western culture in one’s life today,” says the mother of two and an active environmentalist. “Earlier, people used to consider detectives synonymous with murder and crimes cases, but now we receive cases from every sphere of life. Some people come to us for suggestion and advice when they want to take an important decision.” Besides, technological advancement has given way for sophisticated devices such as configurated cell phones. Old tools such as binoculars and magnifying glasses don’t find much importance in today’s detective world. But 42-year-old Malathi still follows the traditional method of stalking or shadowing a person to solve a case. The first case she received was to find a person’s address in a bank loan case. She had limited clues to begin with. But she stalked the person’s daughter to crack the case. “I was most scared when I was locked in a house with my three-year-old daughter while investigating a sub-letting case,” she recollects. “They had got a whiff of it regarding what I was doing there. I managed to cook up some stories and got away. I also saw them dialing the phone number of the original tenants and noted them down. That helped me solve the case,” she says proudly.Police, she says, have been supportive and helped her out in missing cases. But, sometimes, when shadowing, if they break some traffic rules, they pay the fine and move on. “We do our work in such a way that our purpose is not known. This is important to maintain the secrecy of our clients,” she says.However, as this is still not a recognised field yet for women, Malathi has to lose some of her women staff to marriage as their in-laws wouldn’t approve of their chosen careers. “But we always have great relationship with our staff and the clients. We try to make a difference to a person’ life through our services,” she says. For details, call 3297 4662 or 2854 4360.
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