Well-behaved women rarely make history,” says a sticker pasted on Taslima Nasreen’s refrigerator door. But then, rarely do they have to make up their minds about what they are going to do and where they are going to go each time they get shunted out of a country either. That is something that the exiled Bangladeshi author and firebrand feminist is having to do on a regular basis — every six months or so. In fact, the six-month extension of her permission to stay on in India, which she received in August last year, is about to expire. And as D-day — February 17 — closes in on her, the woman who held her head high in spite of several fatwas against her openly tells you that it’s not a nice feeling.

“The uncertainty is very disturbing,” she says. “It’s like standing at a bus stop all your life.” When you are always at the bus stop, you are never home. And, after all these years of standing and waiting, Nasreen wants to go home. But home, for her, is not just Bangladesh. She doesn’t see the two Bengals — East and West — as separate. “It is a forced division, created artificially,” she tells you and says that she doesn’t accept it. “Ideally, I would like to be a part of an undivided Bengal,” she adds wistfully. But at the moment, for all practical purposes, if her “beloved Motherland” — or what the rest of the world knows as Bangladesh — won’t have her, she would like to be a part of India. But New Delhi is not as keen on that. Nasreen has been hoping to get Indian citizenship — but going by past experience she is not too optimistic about that. Right now, she would settle for an extension of her resident permit for a longer period. “I don’t know why I can’t be granted a 10 or even a five-year extension,” she asks, sounding both hurt and exasperated.

She finds the short-term extensions frustrating, having to constantly worry about when the visa will expire. “I seem to be always writing out applications requesting permission for me to stay on somewhere,” she sighs, smiling sadly. “And then waiting.”

Evidently no one is inured to the insecurity and uncertainty of a wait. Not even Taslima Nasreen, who has had years of practice. She has been waiting for over a dozen years. Waiting to return to something that she can call home. It was way back in 1994 that Nasreen first had to flee from her homeland. A gynaecologist and newspaper columnist, she was already in the black book of Islamic fundamentalists for her open criticism of the oppression of women in the name of religion. But it was her book Lajja (Shame), which dealt not only with the injustices against women in her community but also the plight of minority Hindus, that had the hardliners baying for her blood.

Fatwas were announced against her, unleashing a mob fury that forced her to go into hiding in her own country. “I used to be shifted from one hideout to another by friends, sometimes cramped into the back seat of cars, wrapped in blankets held down by suitcases,” she recalls. She didn’t know where she was being taken, what she would do next or whether or not she would be alive the next moment. One day she found herself being bundled up in an aeroplane, heading for an unknown destination with virtually no personal belongings. “I had no idea,” she says today, “that I would never again return to my country.”

The rest, of course, is history. Nasreen, now 44, has been living in exile since, with only a secret visit in 1988 to Bangladesh to be with her sick mother, who was on her death bed. “A lot of people had feared for my life during that trip,” Nasreen says. “But I loved her and nothing could keep me from going and meeting her. I was not afraid to die. But there was a lot of international pressure on the government to ensure that I was safe.”

Letter after letter went to the Bangladesh Prime Minister — penned both by eminent personalities and ordinary citizens of the world — urging Nasreen a safe journey back, ironically enough, from home. “I write on behalf of the International Academy of Humanism to express our concern for the safety of Dr Taslima Nasreen,” wrote Professor Paul Kurtz, president, International Academy of Humanism. And Hermann Bondi, former master, Churchill College, Cambrige, wrote, “I am writing to you out of concern for Dr Taslima Nasreen. Many of us hope and indeed trust that your government will protect this distinguished person from the crude violence that threatens her and abstain from prosecuting her for her alleged views.”

In a letter to her, author Salman Rushdie wrote, “Great writers have agreed to lend their weight to the campaign on your behalf.” They included Czeslaw Milosz, Mario Vargas Llosa and Milan Kundera. And not that Nasreen is not aware of it.

No, Nasreen doesn’t deny that she found “love and acceptance from total strangers” outside of her country. “European countries quarrelled among each other to give asylum to me,” she says. Sweden — where she was first taken to in 1994 — and Germany, in particular, were keen to host her. But when you point out to her that France had once issued her only a 24-hour visa, she immediately reminds you of the flak Paris received for that, including a demand for the resignation of the then President. You can’t miss the urgency in Nasreen’s voice. She wants to make sure that you recognise that when her own people abandoned her, strangers picked her up and gave her shelter.

Yet Nasreen craves the love of her own people. “Everyone needs to come back to a home,” she sighs. At the moment home for her is her plush apartment on Calcutta’s Rowden Street. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be a home full of people. It is a space where you feel independent. A place where you belong.” Her only family member is a cat by the name of Minoo. Nasreen had picked her up from the Gariahat fishmarket when she was only a kitten, abandoned and alone.

Minoo is a fearless and independent creature — more like a tigress or a Baghini, which is what Nasreen calls her. And, yes, she has a home. Nasreen gave her one. The question is, who will give Nasreen a home?