Defying retribution with straight talk:
Taslima Nasreen in a frank chat with Satarupa Ray

There is more to Taslima Nasrin than a controversial writer living in exile. Engaged in the ‘busy-idle diversions’ of life, she paces about her room in Taj Bengal while answering a flurry of phone calls from actors, publishers, police, friends and her die-hard fans. Occasionally she runs her hands through her dishevelled short hair and blurts out an ironical refrain, “Marai Jabo” (I will surely die). Her good-humoured banter on death is disquieting enough. For it reminds us why she fled her country (after Muslim fundamentalists in Bangladesh issued fatwa against the author for her intrepid criticism of Islam) and set trail for the West.

In a way, the expatriate life has strengthened her sense of bonding to her native land. Despite being honoured with accolades and recognition in the West, she still feels like an outsider there.
“I love to live here but I have to live there.” However, as a research scholar, she likes the freedom of opinion that she has been exposed to in the intellectual environment at the renowned Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Currently, she is studying how Islamic countries can follow the path of secularism so that women are accorded equal rights in society.

It was during her days of training in Gynaecology that she faced a close encounter with the plight of women as sexual slaves in the low classes as well as the urban middle-classes. It perturbed her and caused Taslima deep concern when she listened to their sad stories of bondage. She asserts, “I write what I believe in and what is true. Controversy is created by man who cannot accept the truth” Her powerful diatribes are not directed against men as such but a male mindset that lends a thoughtless and diabolic consent to the physical and mental oppression of women in society.

Whether her reader is 80 or 18, she believes that the present generation is not radically different from the previous one. She laments, “There has been a superficial progress in society. Our value system is exactly the same; it is not changing in any positive way.” And she becomes silent.

However, my next question cheers her up adequately as she starts talking about her favourite pastime, adda (a light-hearted tete e tete with friends over chai), which is popularly called the café culture in Paris. Interestingly, Taslima loves travelling to new destinations and she quips, “I ask myself whether this desire has been fulfilled or not. Yes, it has…”

Finally, like all visionaries she too, has a dream. A dream of returning to her motherland. Right now she calls Kolkata her second home. Suddenly I see tenderness in her eyes. And the author gives it poetic expression when she quotes herself, “Ek Ekti Hridoy Hote Pare Ekti Nirapad Swadesh” (Each and every person’s heart can be its own secure homeland).