Famous Bollywood ‘ghost’ who haunted Bipasha Basu in Raaz, quit films and now lives in a forest

There's a special kind of irony in an actor becoming a ghost story herself. Malini Sharma appeared in Raaz, the 2002 horror hit built around a vengeful spirit refusing to let go of the living, and then, she went and did the exact opposite. She just stopped being visible, the same way her character's world was haunted by someone who wouldn't stay gone.

For a few years around the turn of the millennium, that couldn't-look-away energy was exactly why she was everywhere. She popped up in music videos that were inescapable on Indian TV at the time, crossed over into modelling, briefly ran with a Charlie's Angels-style show, and got her Bollywood moment through Vikram Bhatt's Raaz alongside Bipasha Basu and Dino Morea. Her turn in the song Aapke Pyaar Mein is the specific image most people still associate with heroine of those music-video moments that outlived the film cycle around it and became its own cultural artifact.

And then, right when the industry logic says you capitalise on momentum, she reportedly bailed on a film called Encounter two days before shooting, with word at the time being that she wanted off camera and behind it instead. A marriage to actor Priyanshu Chatterjee came and went not long after.

Turns out the answer is: dirt, trees, and bread

The actress has now built a life that's almost aggressively grounded. Sometime after stepping away from film and television, she started something called The Slow Local, which began as unglamorous pop-up stalls in Mumbai's Versova neighborhood selling homemade bread, granola, jams, nut butters, filter coffee and oils.

That project eventually pulled her out of the city altogether and into the countryside, where she embraces slow living.

Where the ghost actually lives now

These days she's settled in the Sahyadri hills, roughly two hours outside Pune, running a farmstay tucked into a patch of greenery she and her family treat like a small private forest. She cooks for guests using vegetables she grows herself, and the land is planted with native trees — arjun, harad, kokum, palash, shikakai, with part of it deliberately left wild and untouched.

On the side, she's also reportedly taken on remote work as a relationship manager for a coffee company, which is either the most normal job reveal in Bollywood-retirement history or extremely on-brand for someone who now sells artisanal coffee beans.

The disappearing act finally got addressed on her own terms in April 2025, when she resurfaced on video for The Slow Local, unpolished and makeup-free, essentially confirming she'd been alive and well the whole time and simply chose to opt out of visibility rather than chase it. In her video she had said, "Facing the camera again after very long... this time the real me, no makeup, no dialogues, shooting from the heart."

She added, “Hi, this is Malini, facing the camera again after 23 years of Raaz. For those of you wondering where I disappeared, well, I am alive. I am here to present The Slow Local Diaries.”

A year later, in April 2026, she was filming herself pointing out a silk cotton tree on the property that only produces its cottony seed pods once every four years.