Dubai, Nov. 10: Maqbool Fida Husain, India’s most famous painter, is afraid to go home.

Husain is fond of painting Hindu goddesses, sometimes portraying them nude. That obsession has earned him the ire of a small but organised cadre of Hindu nationalists. They have attacked galleries that exhibit his work, accused him in court of “promoting enmity” among faiths and, on one occasion, offered a $11-million reward for his head.

In September, India’s Supreme Court offered him an unexpected reprieve, dismissing one of the cases against him with the blunt reminder that Hindu iconography, including ancient temples, is replete with nudity.

Still, the artist, 93 and increasingly frail, is not taking any chances. For two years, he has lived here in self-imposed exile, amid opulently sterile skyscrapers. He intends to remain, at least for now.

“They can put me in a jungle,” he said gamely. “Still, I can create.”

Husain calls the current Congress-led UPA government too weak-kneed to offer him protection from those who might harm him. Mostly, though, he cautions against making too much of his case. India, he insists, is fundamentally “tolerant.”

Husain said he has always been a vagabond, sleeping on the Mumbai streets during his impoverished youth, wandering through Europe to study Rembrandt, or bouncing, as he does now, among several lavish apartments and villas here in Dubai — or rather, cruising among them, in one of his five costly thrill machines, including a lipstick-red Ferrari, his current favourite.

Last March, at a Christie’s auction, his Battle of Ganga and Jamuna, part of a 27-canvas series on the Mahabharata, fetched $1.6 million.

“I am working, it’s OK,” he said. “If things get all right, I’ll go. If they don’t, so be it. What can I do?”

And then he quoted poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a Pakistani who went into exile in the late 1970s during President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq’s regime and who wrote about missing the animosity of his enemies as much as the affection of friends. “Of course,” he conceded, “the heart is there.”

On the morning of Id ul-Fitr, Husain sat in the back seat of his Bentley as it whizzed past a row of construction sites, taking calls from Mumbai on his new iPhone.

Back home on the same day, his granddaughter Rakshanda was getting engaged. It was the first major family event he had missed since his exile. “Such an auspicious day,” he murmured. “Anyway, we will have a ceremony here again.”

In Mumbai, it had been his custom to host an annual Id breakfast for his community, a Shia subsect that calls itself Suleimanis.

Yesterday morning, he hosted one here, too, at a community hall with steaming plates of mutton and flatbread.

A stream of people came to pay their respects, taking his gnarled right hand, placing it above their eyes, one after the other, then to their lips. Husain, a master of flamboyance, stood beaming in a green silk jacket embroidered with motifs from his paintings, including several voluptuous, scantily clad women.

He is now working on two ambitious series: one on Indian civilisation, to be mounted in London, the second on Arab civilisation, which will be exhibited in Qatar.

At sundown, he climbed into the passenger seat of the Ferrari, pounded the dashboard and instructed his driver to hit the gas pedal. The engine revved, and he squealed in delight. He said he had stopped driving several years ago, after cataract surgery.

He does not have a studio in Dubai. There are easels in each of the homes he has bought for his extended clan. He spends a night here, a night there.

One of them is an 11th-floor apartment with spectacular, south-facing views of jagged skyscrapers under construction. It is filled with dozens of small canvases from the 1950s that he had given to a Czech woman he had once intended to marry, though she turned him down.

She found him recently and returned his paintings. “They belong to India,” she told him.

Yesterday afternoon, recalling the story, Husain said he would eventually have to take them home. “Temporarily,” he mused, “they are here.”