Gitanjali. Picture by Ramakant Kushwaha

New Delhi, Sept. 3: As a budding model in the early ’90s, Gitanjali Nagpal would have been “discovered” by a photographer.

Last weekend, she was discovered again by one — while loitering around a south Delhi market, asking people for money.

A decade of tempestuous living — punctuated by failed relationships, career disappointments and alleged drug abuse — had plunged the 32-year-old from the glitzy world of Mumbai’s ramp to Delhi’s streets.

She is homeless and has been sleeping at a Hauz Khas temple since being dumped by her last boyfriend, a British man, she told the media crews covering her 24x7 after the story broke this morning.

As a former model, Gitanjali should be used to cameras but today she found their constant glare “humiliating”.

“I wasn’t begging, I was only asking,” she insisted sitting inside a car outside Hauz Khas police station, surrounded by a crowd of curious faces.

Inside, egged on by the many well-wishers she has suddenly acquired, members of the Delhi Commission for Women furiously scribbled a letter to the metropolitan magistrate, seeking to label the woman with matted hair “mentally unfit”.

The commission, media in tow, had earlier bundled her into a car and driven her to the Vimhans hospital but she refused to get off. “I was told I was being taken shopping for shoes,” she complained.

Hospital psychiatrists, standing outside the car, are believed to have diagnosed her as a patient of “fear psychosis”.

“She’ll be admitted to hospital all right,” commission chairperson Barkha Singh promised at 9pm. She was hoping to get the magistrate’s order late tonight.

Gitanjali snapped at the cameras. “Delhi is so humiliating. Why are you taking my picture?” she shouted at a man.

“Because you are so photogenic,” came the reply. She clammed up but when he asked her where she lived, her reply was scathing: “In outer space.”

“These people can’t even spell my name right,” she snorted after a while. “I have 17 years of education. I know how to spell my name.”

The convent-educated daughter of a navy officer from Kozhikode had been at Lady Shri Ram College for a year before joining Delhi Polytechnic to study fashion. “I would’ve liked to do literature. I love poetry,” she said, breaking into a smile.

Her modelling career had taken her to Mumbai but success eluded her. She moved to Nepal with her boyfriend but broke up with him. She lived in Goa for a year and met a Briton with whom she returned to Delhi. They lived in Paharganj till he left her.

Fashion designer J.J. Vallaya said he remembered Gitanjali as a modelling hopeful in the ’90s. “After that I have no idea what happened to her.”