ONE MORNING Zeba came to fetch me at the safe house. “Come, I need you,” she said. “We have to photograph the cutting of hands.”
The previous day, Voice of Shari’a had announced that a thief would have his hands cut off at the main Ghazi Stadium and had urged all the people to go and watch. Together with several RAWA members from Kabul, we drove to what had once been the football stadium until the Taliban banned all sports.
We were driven in our own cars. The Taliban ordered that men and women travel in separate buses, but if we had done that we would have been sure to lose one another. My RAWA friends had told me about a husband and wife who were separated on the way to a wedding. After a couple of hours they finally found each other and began to argue in front of everyone in the street. Then they saw the comic side of their misfortune and decided, because it was so late, to forget the wedding and go home to bed. In this country, my friends told me, you’re not even free to go to a wedding.
I smiled, but I didn’t have the heart to laugh. I couldn’t see the funny side of stories about life as it was then in Kabul. I understood that my friends felt differently because they were stuck there. They needed to laugh. But I could only think that for many war widows the rule that they could not go out without a mahram was a tragedy. It meant that they could not leave their houses and had no way of earning a living apart from begging in the streets and risking a lashing from the Taliban, or turning to prostitution.
Near the stadium, we saw their patrols ordering shopkeepers to close down and go watch the ritual. I was surprised to see women taking their children with them, but Zeba explained, “They want their children to realize what will happen to them if they ever steal anything. They think scaring them is a good way to educate them.”
When we reached the stadium, several thousand people had already arrived and were waiting quietly. We headed for the women’s section, which was across the stadium from the part reserved for men. The goalposts were still standing. I had been told that sometimes the Taliban would hang someone from them.
A convoy of a dozen jeeps sped onto the field, and men in turbans tumbled out of them, some holding guns. One man was led to the center, and made to lie down on his stomach, his arms spread out in the shape of a cross. I counted no fewer than five Taliban holding the prisoner down. One of them tied his feet together, while another grabbed his hair and forced his head up off the ground.
A mullah spoke to the crowd, using a microphone. He talked about sin and the Day of Judgment. “This man deserves the punishment that he is about to get,” he said. “All those who steal will be punished in this way.”
As he spoke, a group of people who must have been the prisoner’s family begged for mercy, only to be lashed by the Taliban.
I saw a figure standing to one side, a white scarf wrapped around his face so that it left only his eyes free. “He’s a doctor,” Zeba whispered to me. “He’s frightened that if people recognize him afterward, they will kill him for helping the Taliban.”
Together with the other RAWA members, we pressed close around Zeba to hide her from the crowd, and she started taking photographs with a small hidden camera. She was careful not to waste pictures because she could not risk stopping to put in a new film, which would have drawn attention to us.
The Taliban in the black turban drew a knife, knelt down on one knee at the prisoner’s side, and started sawing at the man’s right wrist.
The blood spurted onto a patch of earth.
I could watch no more. I suddenly felt a pain in my wrist as if I had felt the blade against my skin. I felt faint and sat down on the floor in the middle of the crowd, which seemed to have become frozen.
A few of the women around me cried out against the Taliban and against the doctor, who was binding the man’s wrists to try to stop the flow of blood. “One day you will all be lying in that man’s place,” I overheard one woman say. “May Allah grant that you will be next,” said another. But they did not speak very loudly.
The children around me laughed and clapped. For them what they were seeing was entertainment, as normal as the soccer games they used to watch on television before the Taliban took power. And what’s more, it was free. I tried to imagine the future of these children. They would all become heartless criminals if things went on like this.
I thought how strange it was that these children were free to laugh at such a spectacle but that I as a woman was forbidden to laugh in a public place.
Sometime later, after another cutting of hands, Zeba took a picture of a boy, grinning from ear to ear, as he held up a man’s severed hands, which he had taken from the tree where the Taliban had hung them. The boy was playing with his friend. They had been throwing their trophies to each other across the street and laughed.
I still have that photograph. I admire Zeba for having the idea of pointing her camera at this boy: she had found someone who was so proud and happy to have his picture taken that he would never have denounced her. And I pity the boy for feeling important because Zeba was photographing him, and for failing to understand the horror of what he was doing.
I had felt powerless in the stadium. I had wanted to go to the man and help him, but there was nothing I could do.
THE WOMEN had spoken quietly in the stadium, but at least they had dared to voice criticism of the Taliban.
The strongest challenge to the Taliban’s authority I saw was made by a woman I came across when I was walking through a market in the center of Kabul accompanied by a male RAWA supporter who was pretending to be my mahram escort. She was standing in front of a vegetable stall and handing over some money to pay for her purchases. I saw a Taliban patrol approach in a jeep with a white flag flying.
The arrival of these patrols often caused a wave of panic. Women who were without a mahram would turn to complete strangers and offer to pay them to pretend that they were together. “Please, be my brother,” the women would plead. It was a dangerous solution. Women who were found out were whipped, as was the pretend brother.
One of the Taliban—he looked to be little more than a teenager—jumped down from the jeep, marched up to her with his whip, and lashed out at her arm. The woman, who had not seen the patrol, had broken the law that women must not have any direct contact with shopkeepers and must have a mahram to buy things for them.
Far from cowering away, the woman turned on the Taliban like a Fury. “I am old enough to be your mother, and you whip me? Don’t you feel ashamed?” she shouted at him.
She was so incensed that she even dared to pull off her burqa and throw it at the feet of the Taliban. “Here, why don’t you wear it yourself?” she mocked him.
She was tall and strong. I guessed she was in her forties. Her attacker was so surprised that he did not know how to respond. No one had trained him for that kind of resistance. All he had been taught was how to whip women. He slunk away. After her victory, the woman retrieved her burqa, put it back on again, and continued her shopping. I marveled at her bravery.
Other, more discreet signs of rebellion warmed my heart during my visit to Kabul. As small as they were, they showed me that the people were still alive.
Despite the Taliban attempt to crush it to dust, many women clung to their femininity. Several of the young women I met wore makeup or perfume under the burqa, and they visited beauty salons that operated in secrecy. The salons were popular especially with brides, who wanted to make themselves as beautiful as possible, even under the Taliban. Strangely, cosmetics were sold in the shops, although their use was forbidden.
Even wearing something as petty as nail polish, which was banned by the Taliban, could bring terrible punishment. I was shocked to see the young daughter of a RAWA member painting her long nails a bright pink color.
“But isn’t it dangerous?” I stammered.
“What am I supposed to do? Stop living because of them? If they want to beat me, let them beat me,” she replied.
I was amazed. I knew that the Taliban had cut off the fingertips of some women they had caught wearing nail polish.
I SAW SEVERAL EXAMPLES of dedication in Kabul, and one of those that impressed me most was that of Khalida, a teacher in charge of teaching clandestine classes for some three hundred children in various areas of Kabul. Under the Taliban, girls could not go to school, and boys could study only the Koran, so RAWA had set up these classes for children whose parents were ready to take a risk for the sake of their offspring’s future.
Already the Taliban had found out about Khalida’s classes from their spies and had told her she must stop teaching. She had told them that she would stop. Then she had simply moved the classes to another safe house. She risked execution if she was caught again.
I went to find Khalida at a small two-room mud house that belonged to a RAWA member and her husband. The couple were part of the security cover—if the Taliban raided the house, they could always say that the children were theirs. Often couples like these would have to move to a new house every five months or so, simply to ensure that the children could study in safety.
I gave the password that had been agreed upon previously, and the couple let me in. Having to wear burqas had made passwords more necessary than ever, because you could never tell who your visitors were just by looking through the window as they arrived at your door.
Khalida was teaching a Persian class of only four children when I visited her. In the Kartayi Parwan area to the west of the old city it was too dangerous to hold classes that were any bigger. The children were aged from eight to fourteen and were sitting on the carpet. They had been told to say, if asked, that they had come to visit their aunt, never their teacher. The parents brought each child to the house at a different time and never told them what RAWA was, let alone that it had anything to do with the class.
It was impossible to give them any homework in case they were found carrying it. The children of Afghanistan were allowed to carry a Kalashnikov but not homework.
On the blackboard that rested against one of the damp and dirty walls, Khalida had taken the precaution of writing “I begin with the name of Allah,” because Allah was the first word that boys learned in the Taliban schools. Underneath, a child had written “I love my country.”
Khalida had placed an open copy of the Koran prominently in front of her. After the class had ended, she explained to me that she always had one out so that if any Taliban burst in she could slip the Persian or math book they were really using underneath it and pretend that the children were studying the Koran, which was tolerated.
Khalida was exhausted and besieged me with her list of demands. “We need a bigger house so that we can teach more children. You know what the children say to me? ‘We are so hungry and our stomachs are making so much noise that we can’t understand the lesson.’ I have to stop the class and go fetch some bread. Can’t RAWA pay for their food and their clothes? And I need money to buy the stationery for the children because their parents can’t afford it. You have no idea how many children are not coming to me simply because their parents can’t pay for the pens and the paper. Can’t you pay for that too?”
She was so desperate she started shouting and slapping the carpet with the flat of her hand. I told her to keep her voice down, that we risked drawing the attention of the neighbors. She calmed down.
I felt sorry for her. “I’ll ask and see what they say. But you have to understand that we’re not talking about free stationery just for your children. It would have to be free for all our classes in Afghanistan,” I said.
Khalida’s children were not even a drop in the ocean, but they were the future of Afghanistan. Later I was able to send her good news—RAWA could not afford to pay for food and clothing, but it did agree to pay for the stationery of the children who went to its classes all over Afghanistan, and we found her two new safe houses too.