Outside the rain is lashing down on the green fields of the Punjab Doaba from a low-slung monsoon sky. We’re less than 10 minutes into the interview and journalistic objectivity has already gone flying out of the window. Hang on, we tell ourselves by way of exchanging silent glances. A moll? She? Come on. Give us a break! Someone’s pulled a joke here — a mean, nasty joke.

A growing sense of sympathy begins to cloud our judgment — bad for business, as any aspiring reporter is taught on his first day in journalism school. But it takes one look at Monica Bedi to unlearn all those caveats. A picture of rustic innocence, she now sits quietly, like a deer caught in the headlights, on the edge of a sofa across the room.

Dressed in a plain yellow salwar kameez, she appears strikingly beautiful, her looks ironically accentuated by rigorous years in prison. The extra kilos are all but gone, and her skin glows with a radiance that can only be credited to a lean diet of jailhouse broth. When she’s not speaking to us, her idyllic gaze, as bashful now as it was daring in the days when she faced the camera, remains mostly fixed on the blankness of the ceiling above.

“I was pushed to take steps that were not really out of my own will,” she sighs, her eyes scanning the floral design on the carpet for appropriate words to string her sentences with. “I had no choice… that’s all I can say.”

Whoever could think of sentencing this poor creature to such untold misery, we wonder. Call the men in the black robes. Right now.

This is the first time in about a decade that Monica Bedi has returned to her ancestral home in Chabewal, a tiny hamlet of 5,000 households about 140 km north of Chandigarh. Her father, Prem Bedi, is back too, leaving in the hands of his son the reins of a flourishing garment export business that he set up in Drammen, Norway, after emigrating there some three decades ago. His daughter — who in the coming years would go on to become Chabewal’s most famous export — was less than a year old then.

Bedi flew down to Hyderabad late last month, two days before Monica — now 32 — was due to be released from jail. He received her at the prison gates and brought her back to the innocuous family home in rural Punjab, where she could sit back and get over the bitter aftertaste of the roller-coaster life she had come to call her own. A life, which she says, was hitherto lived more on someone else’s terms than her own.

It was through those years that Monica Bedi etched out a career for herself as a Bollywood starlet, occasionally landing roles with top heroes because, the nasty whisper went, she had links with the underworld. When things got murky, she left India with Dawood Ibrahim’s aide Abu Salem — now in jail — under a false identity, only to be arrested by the police in Portugal in 2002. Extradited to India in 2005, she spent nearly two years in jail before being acquitted in one of two cases of passport forgery in July.

Predictably, she chooses not to recall much from those troubled times she’s left behind her. Dubai, where she went frequently for stage shows and vacations and where she reportedly got entangled with the underworld, is strictly above and beyond discussion. No reference to Abu Salem, please, she pleads midway through the interaction, “I don’t talk about that man any more.” Ask her about Portugal and all she does is sniff (she’s been under the weather, she excuses herself later).

“Umm… well… it’s a nice place to go for a holiday,” she then adds with a laugh, almost as an afterthought. “Nice weather, warm people, great shopping. Not a good place to settle down, though. Not for me, at least.”

She was punished for someone else’s doings, she still maintains. “I mean, it was just a passport case,” she reasons. “I had no idea that it was such a big crime. I wasn’t even responsible for it.” Of course not. Okay, she gallivanted around Portugal on a fake passport bearing a fake identity. But she was coerced, don’t you see? Mean old world, we shake our heads. Mean. Mean.

So scared was she when the Portuguese police swooped down on her that Monica — desperate to free herself from the clutches of both the cops and one of India’s most wanted men — shot off letters to a bunch of powers-that-be back home, including Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, calling out for help.

“I was afraid. So many things were going on then, because of that man,” she says. “I had no idea why I was wanted back in India. I wrote to all our political leaders to tell me what I had done wrong, and asked if they could help me through the most difficult time of my life.”

Of course, no one replied. “Besides, I had only just begun to think of sorting out the mess I had got myself into.” Pity the authorities didn’t allow her to do so.

She does speak at length on her experiences in jail, though. About her sharing a cell with three “illiterate girls from the villages,” the wake-up calls at six, teaching English grammar and yoga to fellow inmates through the day, and watching movies once in a while in the afternoons. “We ended up watching all my movies; the girls would specifically ask the warden for them,” she says.

When she had time to kill, she read the Bible — she’d picked up her copy from Portugal — cover to cover, and thumbed through it many times over. “I’m not an avid reader,” she confesses. “But the Bible gave me a lot of mental strength. It taught me to be positive.”

In captivity, she missed her favourite Thai soups. She missed dance — Kathak especially. After all, it was her passion for dance that had brought her down to India, some 12 years ago, on a short vacation that eventually never came to an end. It was in the studios of danseuse Gopi Kishan one evening that she met actor-director Manoj Kumar, who offered her a role in his upcoming film. “I had it quite easy from there,” she recalls. Languishing in jail, she missed those 15 minutes (okay, maybe a little more) of fame under the arc lights too, and she desperately hoped, clutching the Bible in her fists, that she would finally be free one day.

When she arrived in Chabewal a couple of weeks ago, she craved so much for homely comforts that she asked her folks for a plate of sarson da saag and makki di roti — the frozen variety, of course, in this odd season. Now she’s complaining that her family is stuffing her with too much food through the day — she’s scared she might put on too much weight. “In the films, you have to be conscious of your figure,” she says.

There’s reason for her apprehensions. Offers to star in films have started to trickle in again, despite the fact that she still has a court case pending against her. They’re coming from all over, she says — from Bollywood, from the Telugu film industry where she once featured quite prominently, a few from further down south. There’s also a proposal from a party for her to take up politics — “I haven’t given that much of a thought yet,” she says. But she’s happy that the world has accepted her back, and given her a fresh chance to prove herself. “I have so many people to thank,” she says.

She’ll be in Punjab for a few weeks more, she reveals, in between sips of milky tea, getting over the past before she shifts to Mumbai to take the plunge once again. And Monica Bedi, wiser, stronger, braver — and, let’s not forget, more beautiful — than ever, says she’s not scared.

“I have no one to fear,” she declares, “which is why I haven’t even asked for any security after my release. I don’t see any reason why I should need it. I don’t have enemies. I’ve never done anybody any harm. The hard times are over. And I have paid for my mistakes.”

Like the Bible would have said, it was ordained. “That man”, sitting in Arthur Road prison, might do well to order his copy now.