Taslima, now in the US, told the Washington Post that she desperately wants to meet her mother who's suffering from colon cancer. Authorities at her home country are unlikely to let her in unless she recants her views on religion and life.

``All her lawyers' attempts to negotiate even a brief visit have proved fruitless,''said the daily. ``I am willing to risk everything,'' Taslima said with a note of desperation. ``But it is not possible. The authorities will not let me in, even though I have a right to go there.''

``They say the fundamentalists will make trouble if I go back. I will be thrown out from the airport if I try. And my mother is dying. She will die within two weeks.'' The 35-year-old poet, novelist, feminist and self-proclaimed atheist, the daily said, has been in exile for four years in Sweden, Germany and now inthe US. She lives in fear, behind locked doors most of the time. ``I do not always feel safe,'' she told the paper, ``there are a lot of Muslim fundamentalists here and I heard that newspapers in their language keep informing about my whereabouts. Taslima said that even in the US she had to face problems of undue publicity, which, many a times, had put her into embarrassing situation. Her troubles worsened after the publication of ``Shame,'' which portrayed atrocities a Bangladeshi family faced, for being Hindus ``living in the path of a Muslim storm over the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya.''Taslima insists that the book is meant as a condemnation of religious fanaticism in all its forms. But that did not satisfy the fundamentalists. Her main source of income is book-royalty, from Shame in particular. But the money dwindles, she said.

Taslima places great hope in her autobiography, which is slated for publication this month in India and, before the end of the year, in France.Although the autobiographycovers the first 15 years of her life before her political travails began, said her French translator, Philippe Benoit, a young professor at Sorbonne, its candour will be seen as explosive in bangladesh.

``It is sad,'' Taslima said reflecting on her life, ``I have no country of my own. It is like a bus stop here.''