When Mid-Day first contacted former actress Mamta Kulkarni for an interview after she was named in a multi-crore drug racket in Mumbai, she sent a polite message saying she would talk to us only if we read her book, Autobiography of a Yogi.
That, she said, was the only way we would know the real Mamta.
She writes about her transformation from sex bomb in movies like Karan Arjun and Ashiq Awara to a yogini.
She details her discontentment with the world of Bollywood since 1995, and how she started leaning towards spirituality after she met her guru Shri Gagangiri Maharaj, whose ashram is in Khapoli.
"I was No. 2 in Bollywood when I quit," she told media in a telephone conversation from Nairobi on Wednesday evening. "I just got tired of it. I started doing my penance. And then my mother died, and I shifted to Dubai."
She speaks about several incidents that she says clearly showed her that she was meant for a life of spirituality: from the time when, during a shoot in Mauritius, she was chanting a mantra and she saw the sun rotate 360 degrees and charge at her; to the time when her mother was in the ICU and she placed vibhuti (holy ash) from her guru in her mouth and she miraculously came back from the brink; to the time a friend lured her to a five-star hotel for a drink and she fainted for 25 minutes after the first one only to realise it was her guru's way of making sure she didn't drink anymore.
"I always used to ask myself this question: Why am I here?" she said. "It was not for Bollywood but to become a yogini. It was my Bollywood-crazy mother who made sure I became an actress. Even when I was a child, she would carry me in her arms to Chor Bazaar to buy old Hindi records."
It was after her Bollywood stint that she fell in love with alleged druglord and co-accused, Vicky Goswami, and moved to Dubai. Some reports say the two were married but Goswami has refuted that claim saying Kulkarni was only a well-wisher who stood by him. Goswami was jailed in 1997, and served 10 years.
"I prayed for him to get out during my penance," is all Mamta would say. "And his sentence got shortened! We are just friends now and I live alone in a rented apartment in Nairobi."
She says meditation and yoga takes up all her time and that all she wants to do is spend life like her guru. She also maintains she is innocent. Earlier this week, she got a huge boost when one of the accused and the main witness, Jay Mukhi, who had earlier stated that Kulkarni had attended a meeting in Kenya with him, denied having ever met the actress.