January 12, 2008	Saturday	Muharram 02,1429

PARIS, Jan 11: Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, under Indian government protection from Islamist death threats, described her life in hiding as a “slow and lingering death” in a text released in France on Friday.

“I am merely a disembodied voice. Those who once stood by me have disappeared into the darkness,” the 45-year-old Nasreen wrote in an article to be published in Saurday’s edition of Le Monde newspaper.

Nasreen complains she feels abandoned to her fate, after being whisked from Bengali-speaking Kolkata last month to an undisclosed safe house in New Delhi following violent Muslim protests over her writings.

“I am like the living dead: benumbed; robbed of the pleasure of existence and experience; unable to move beyond the claustrophobic confines of my room...

It is like a slow and lingering death, like sipping delicately from a cupful of slow-acting poison that is gradually killing all my faculties.” Nasreen left her Muslim-majority homeland of Bangladesh in 1994 after receiving death threats from Islamic extremists, and has since lived in exile in Europe, the United States and, since 2004, in the east Indian city of Kolkata.

Extremist Muslims accuse Nasreen, who was born into a Muslim family but now calls herself an atheist, of blasphemy over her 1994 novel “Lajja” or “Shame”, which depicts the life of a Hindu family persecuted by Muslims in Bangladesh.—AFP