"In a cave," I responded.
"In a cave?" the interviewer responded, incredulous. The world's newspapers had reported Taslima's being forced to leave her native country. "60 Minutes" had televised the thousands of Muslim fundamentalists who marched in Dhaka and demanded her death. She was known to have escaped to Germany and Sweden. But in a cave?
I explained that at a conference of the Council for Secular Humanism in Mexico City, everyone had a chance to visit the pyramids south of the city. And on the tour we had been taken to an underground restaurant which operated in a cave, a delightfully cool place where the two of us over excellent food and wine were introduced by Matt Cherry. When she learned that I am from New York City, where her sister lives and where she hoped to visit, I invited her to visit me. When she learned that I am an editor, she asked if I might be willing to help edit some of her many poems, stories, journalistic pieces, and books.
We have been family since that memorable day in the cave, I was her guest in Sweden for a week, we have e-mailed back and forth, she hid with me in New York (and I took her to the very spots where no guide would know about), I became her nephew Suhrid's tutor for an entire summer, and with the help of Alan Levin and Peter Ross have come up with a new homepage the very week that she became a researcher on the staff of Harvard University.
Click on this picture to read an Indian interview, one of the best!
