Calcutta, Feb. 1: Taslima Nasreen has named her suspects. And they are far from usual.

“If I would have ever been told that Buddhababu would ban my book, that Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shankha Ghosh and Dibyendu Palit would demand that I be silenced, I would never have believed it. But that’s exactly what has happened,” she says, running a deliberate hand through her carefully-cropped hair.

The banning of her Dwikhandita (Split in Two) by the chief minister “on the advice of” a group of leading Bengali literateurs has left the writer on the run from homeland Bangladesh “shocked and surprised”.

For, the latest move to “silence” her and “snatch” her pen has come from unexpected quarters — from “friends in the literary world who earlier professed to uphold the right to freedom of expression”, a “chief minister who has been a vocal opponent of fascist forces”.

If with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee she’s had “a chat on cultural matters” during each of her previous visits, with the literary coterie she insists “advised” the chief minister on the ban, Taslima has shared “a special bond” ever since her harassment began beyond the eastern borders.

So the sense of disbelief, the talk of betrayal.

“The fundamentalists are evil but honest, they at least believe in what they say and do. But these people here are fundamentalists in the garb of liberals. They are hypocritical. That is far more dangerous, I now realise,” she says firmly.

While prime accused Bhattacharjee remains mum on the matter, the three men of letters are quick to distance themselves from the book ban.

On this visit — with plainclothesmen posted outside her hotel room round the clock — Taslima is left eyeing a veiled window of opportunity to meet Bhattacharjee at Nandan, but not to talk about what the Dwikhandita ban has split wide open. “I want to meet him as I have always met him, not as chief minister or CPM leader, but as a lover of the arts,” says the woman persecuted in Bangladesh and pampered in Bengal till very recently.

“She must get in touch with the chief minister’s office first,” points out home secretary Amit Kiran Deb, when asked about Writers’ Buildings’ official position on Bhattacharjee meeting the writer scorned.

Taslima is clear that she doesn’t even react to her work being banned or a fatwa being issued in Bangladesh. But from Bengal her expectations are different. This is a progressive anti-fundamentalist Left government, not a pro-fundamentalist establishment, she argues. These are writers who have stood for freedom of thought and expression, not fundamentalist forces opposed to freedom, she adds.

But doesn’t the storm raised by Dwikhandita threaten to cut a crusader down to a mischief maker washing dirty linen in public? “This is an autobiography, it is my true story. If I haven’t changed Taslima to Mallika, why should I not name people who have come into my life and shaped my experience, my struggle?” defends the combative writer.

Into her second week in Calcutta, Taslima has found support from diverse quarters — from Mahasveta Devi (“I am completely opposed to the idea of banning Taslima’s book”) and Shobhaa Dé (“The ban smacks of immaturity, lack of awareness”), to an anonymous admirer who sends her a bouquet of red roses (“with no thorns”) every day and “the hundreds” who log on to the website of her works to read Dwikhandita online.