Shweta Basu-Prasad: I told myself 'Shweta is dead'

Peering coyly out from between the vegetable and fruit carts laden with pomellos and grapefruits at Four Bungalows, Andheri (West), are film posters peddling smut with slyly moralistic undertone: Zara Sambhal is the cautionary title of a new Hindi film about prostitution. “Do minute ki mazaa, zindagi bhar ki sazaa" goes the tagline above the photo of a scantily-clad actress thrusting out her chest.
A couple of hundred meters from where these posters are, on a 25th floor apartment, young Shweta Basu-Prasad is looking out of her bedroom window trying to gauge the lay of this film-land.
Shweta, 23, a national award-winning actress, has just returned to Mumbai after spending two months at a government-run rescue and rehabilitation centre for women in Hyderabad. She was sent there at the end of August after a dramatic operation by the Special Task Force of Andhra Pradesh police which believed her to be soliciting clients a five-star hotel.
A statement widely attributed to her and allegedly given to the police while under questioning, said that she was encouraged to get into prostitution to “support her family and some other good causes."
READ: Shweta Basu Prasad's life under threat?
Shweta emphatically denies ever having made that statement, saying both she and her family have been maligned. “I have had a simple upbringing but have never lacked for anything." She also denies ever hiring an agent named Balu who was arrested that night accepting cash allegedly on her behalf, and says she only spoke to Balu 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 he was a Supreme Court judge and not yet famous for his pronouncements on all things Indian, Justice Markandey Katju considered regulating prostitution. Citing references from Buddha's contemporary, the courtesan Amrapali to Dostoyevsky's character in Crime and Punishment, Sonya Marmelodov, the court sought suggestions from an especially constituted panel to enable sex workers to continue their work with dignity. The humane approach of the Supreme Court sits at odds with the police in India who continue to view soliciting as both a moral and a law and order problem.
The Hyderabad police's special operation is a test case. According to information available with this newspaper, an unnamed journalist from a local TV channel, TV5, “tipped off“ the Special Task Force deputy commissioner of police Limba Reddy about Shweta Basu-Prasad. The police, eager to get cracking, planted one of their informers as a decoy customer who approached Balu and who in turn allegedly negotiated a rate before accepting Rs 10,000 as part payment. It was on the basis of this tip off, this tenuous arrangement, that a raid was conducted on the hotel that night and Shweta was picked up to be `rescued.' Her name was made public, she was asked to cooperate with the police, and then sent to a remand home to be rehabilitated.
“We had specific information that Balu was arranging customers for Shweta Basu for a price. We kept a watch on her movements after a sting operation by a TV channel came to our notice, and we decided to conduct a decoy operation,“ said additional deputy commissioner N Koti Reddy, refusing to divulge the name of the client. According to the police Shweta is a victim and will be a witness in the ongoing trial at the Errum T Manzil Court against Balu.
he woman who opens the door of that flat on the 25th floor is remarkably poised. Where Bollywood is full oftragically clichéd stories of child starsbeing forced to bridge those awkward teenage years by stuffing their brassiere with false padding and wearing unsuitable makeup and clothes to camouflage the gawkiness, Shweta Basu-Prasad chose to step out of the limelight entirely, after stellar roles inMakdee and Iqbal as a child actor. She chose instead to focus on her schooling andlater a course in mass media, doing photography and writing for publications like the Parsi community paper Jam-e-Jamsheed and news letters for short film festivals. In between, after she turned 18,she starred in a few regional films, but mainly Shwetaspent the last three years researching and directing a documentary on Hindustani classicalmusic. Save for that one photo of her receiving the national award as best child actor from President APJ Kalam, there is not a single photograph of hers in the house. Her room has a monastic single bed and a stack of books that range from the Bhagwad Geeta to HG Wells's The Invisible Man to Roderick Matthews's Jinnah vs Gandhi.
She betrays little emotion as she talks about her experience, referring to it as “an episode in my life.“ There is a quick biographical sketch -her Bengali mother does freelance scripting work, her Bihari father is a civil engineer who has lived abroad for the most part, the stint at Poddar School followed by a correspondence course in mass media, her love for classical music (she is a trained sitar player), and the accidental foray into acting. There is nothing in that narrative to mark her as a “sorry bitch,“ as people perceive her these days, she says.
She won't talk about what happened in the hotel that night, she won't talk about the case since it's sub-judice. “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)."
At the remand home, she encountered women and runaway children caught for trafficking, for drugs, and other misdemeanours. Like them, she too was alone and confused. In that fog of despair, acting truths came to her rescue. “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'.“ The tears and the exhortation to God would come at night.
On her fifth night at the remand home, she wrote a poem. It's called The Cliff, and this is how it runs: Later she calls to say the poem should be used carefully in the article. “It should not seem as if I was suicidal or something. I chose to fly and rise above it all, you know.“
“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.
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