Actress Shweta Basu Prasad, who became the pivot of a prostitution scandal recently, has said in an interview that 'bad luck' led to her being arrested from a Hyderabad hotel and that events didn't happen quite the way they were made out to be in media reports.
The actress, who is back in Mumbai after spending two months at a rehabilitation centre in Hyderabad, told Mumbai Mirror that she didn't turn to the sex trade to support her family. "I have had a simple upbringing but have never lacked for anything," she said.
She also denies ever hiring an agent named Balu, who was also arrested that night for accepting cash allegedly on her behalf, and says she only spoke to him because he told her he wanted her to attend some events. "We actresses do these events - award functions, ribbon cutting etc," she says. "For instance, I had gone to Hyderabad to attend an awards function, the Santosham Awards, and the organisers had paid for my air fare and hotel stay. It was my bad luck that I decided to stay on an extra day to meet my friends which is when the raid happened."
While the 23-year-old National Award-winner refused to talk about what happened in the hotel that night, she did tell Mumbai Mirror, "I don't understand how I got into such a big mess. I was not doing drugs, I was not murdering someone... people are so interested (only) because they think here's some sex, some suffering and someone with a name (sic)."
She also spoke about her experiences at the remand home and admitted to being caught in a "fog of despair."
"I decided to teach the children of the remand home - there's a school within its compound - Hindi, English and music. I told myself 'Shweta is dead, she has disappeared into this character of a school teacher that she is portraying.
Just portray the character and make it a good performance'."
Mumbai Mirror also reproduced a poem Shweta wrote while in the remand home, with this accompanying clarification from Shweta: "It should not seem as if I was suicidal or something. I chose to fly and rise above it all, you know."
Shweta's poem:
"Thunderstruck, all alone, I stand here at the edge of the cliff./I crawled the dense forest to get here/The tribes and wild and strays/ They say 'Jump, jump from the cliff.'/As I look down, naked, cold and trembling,/The ferocious sea I see with its mouth open/It's ready to swallow me./ The noises are unbearable/the place so dark. /As I decided to jump in the sea I saw the North Star./I remembered how it shone above my blessed home/where singing hugging and laughter awaited me/I said, 'Wait I want to go home.'/The voices murmured, 'End the journey.'/'Jump! Jump you ugly thing.'/I smiled to them and pitied them,/They don't know I have wings.
Shweta Basu Prasad, who won a National Award for her role as a child star in 2002 film Makdee, was arrested in a Hyderabad hotel last month, with the organizer of the alleged prostitution racket. She was quoted then as saying that bankruptcy had forced her into the sex trade. Many film insiders had publicly spoken out in her support, including actress Deepika Padukone and TV star Sakshi tanwar who played Shweta's mother on the hit soap Kahani Ghar Ghar Kii.
