Every morning, as she watches her drag herself out of bed and dress herself with painstaking slowness, Nadine Angus has to stop herself from crying out: “Buck up, Daisy! Get a move on!” She daren’t even take dawdling Daisy to the supermarket because she will have to tear her away from the fruit and vegetables.

For Daisy, back home in Bournemouth having spent nearly five years in Indian prisons after being wrongly convicted of drug smuggling, the world is a dizzying, overwhelming place. “My mum complains that I am doing everything too slowly. But I am used to taking my time over washing and dressing to while away the hours,” she says. “It’s hard to get back to a normal rhythm. I feel as if I’m in a film that’s been speeded up.”

Daisy’s story, of the trial that dragged on for more than three years, serves as the most chilling example of all backpacking tales. When Daisy left home to travel the world, she was just 22, still living at home with her two younger brothers, and working as a physical therapist. Now she is approaching 27, a near-stranger who has experienced a level of physical depredation that her mother cannot bear to imagine.

Daisy’s mother, never doubting her innocence, gave up her job as a nursery nurse to fight for her release. The family spent more than £100,000 and had to remortgage to pay for lawyers and fly back and forth to visit her in prison. Her father John died of leukaemia in 2005.

“I think my prison sentence contributed to my father’s stress and illness,” she says. “And I realised that I was the one putting lines on my mother’s face. I saw her ageing before my eyes.” She finds her hard-won freedom, for which her family has paid a terrible price, bewildering. Her mother will often walk in on her and she will be sitting in silence, staring at a blank wall. “I have to do it. It’s my way of coping, like meditation.”

Her ordeal began during a round-the-world holiday in November 2002. She had been in India on her way to Australia to meet friends for a working holiday when she took a fateful detour. Her parents, who had both done charity work in India, were planning to celebrate John’s 50th birthday in Dharam-sala in the north. Changing her itinerary to join them there, she found her onward airline ticket to Australia was no longer valid.

She turned to a local businessman, Yoram Kadesh, a friend of one of her girlfriends, for advice. He told her that she would need a new ticket and that it would be cheaper to fly from Mumbai to Berlin, where he happened to be going, to buy one. She agreed.

On the train journey back to Mumbai, her bag split. Later, meeting him in his hotel, he offered to carry her possessions in one of his cases. As they prepared to check in for a KLM flight to Berlin together, customs officers found 10 kilos of cannabis in the bag that contained some of Daisy’s clothing. Though Daisy denied ownership and all knowledge of its contents, she was arrested. Kadesh fled the airport, but was apprehended.

Both Daisy and Kadesh were charged with drug smuggling. As foreigners, they were both denied bail and jailed pending their trial. Beginning in April 2003, it did not conclude until June last year. To the incredulity of Daisy’s family, she was found guilty of drug smuggling and sentenced to 10 years. Kadesh was acquitted. She could have chosen repatriation and served her sentence in Britain, but that would have meant relinquishing the right to appeal. “I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had done that. I would have been stuck with the label ‘drug smuggler’ for the rest of my life.”

Friends of the family have claimed Kadesh befriended her to set her up as a drug mule. But she trusted him and she finds his behaviour inexplicable. Kadesh’s acquittal may now become the subject of an appeal by the public prosecutor and his whereabouts are unknown.

For much of her time in prison, she shared a cell 80ft by 100ft with up to 100 women, many of them convicted murderers. They slept on hessian mats under halogen lights that were never switched off. Cockroaches were commonplace, as were maggots in her daily diet of rice and lentils. “I used to think to myself, ‘Well, at least the maggots are protein’.” Suffering from malaria and then suspected meningitis, she was admitted to hospital several times.

It was not until two months ago that her conviction was overturned on appeal. When she emerged from jail, having lost 2½ stone, her mother was waiting patiently for her in the shade of a banyan tree. “I wanted to kneel down and kiss the ground,” she says, “but I thought my mum would think that was a bit weird.” Instead she hugged her mother, screamed with joy, and asked for a vanilla ice cream. The taste was heart-stopping.

Her mother took her to a friend’s borrowed flat in Mumbai where she fed her an omelette and salad, the first fresh food she had eaten in five years. She found some gold stilettos and, kicking off the filthy flip-flops she had worn for so long, danced round the living room.

She wanted to tell her mother so much about her long years of suffering, but the words wouldn’t come. “I found it difficult to remember any English,” she says. “I had no confidence speaking because I had had so little contact with Europeans.”

Meeting her, you realise her English is not yet fluent: her accent is more Bollywood than Bournemouth and she struggles for the right words. “People can’t place me because I don’t sound British any more,” she says. “I can’t be bothered to go into detail. I just say, ‘I’ve been away for a long time’.”

To preserve her sanity, she filled her days with projects. She learnt to speak Hindi so fluently that she could give exercise classes for fellow inmates. She helped set up a library and taught basic English. She has 13 GCSEs, science A-levels and a diploma in occupational therapy, so asked her mother to send her textbooks, wanting to keep up her sciences. “My mum’s devotion got me through. She never gave up hope. And my friends never stopped writing to me. I have four suitcases of letters from them.”

Many of the inmates had small children with them in jail; others were pregnant. When one young Bangladeshi woman went into labour in the cell, Daisy delivered the baby, putting up a sheet around her to give her some privacy. “I was with my sister when she gave birth so I wasn’t completely unprepared,” she says.

She would now like to apply to medical school, but realises she faces many hurdles along the way. “I don’t exactly have a very good CV. Five years in an Indian jail doesn’t look very impressive. How do I explain that away?”

Salvation came when Heather Saville, a British businesswoman living in Mumbai, heard about Daisy’s conviction and offered to help find a good lawyer. Daisy was released on Easter Sunday, but was unable to get a plane home. She says she felt abandoned by the British high commission, finding its staff “shockingly” unhelpful. She had to stay in India a further two weeks before its officials issued a passport.

She does not waste time cursing her luck or her gullibility. With a maturity beyond her years, she says: “I have been pulled into many pieces. I need to recuperate and then make up for lost time.”

Deprived of fresh air and sky for so long, she is going for regular walks along the beach and in the New Forest. But before she can get on with her life, she has some unattended business. “I spent so many birthdays in jail,” she says. “I know I am going to be 27 this year but I feel as if I ought to be 22 again. I want to go back and claim back those years.”

She is planning the twenty-something celebrations she never had. A case of stop the world, Daisy wants to get on.

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