The café seemed serene, even hopeful. Glowing yellow fairy lights. A leafy canopy speckled with chirping birds. The divine smell of freshly baked naan-e Afghani.
Enclosed by dusty streets where Taliban wielded Kalashnikovs like toys, this female-only café was one of Zahra’s last sanctuaries in Kabul.
“The food is really expensive and bad,” she told me earlier this month. “But we love the café a lot because it has some trees and a small garden and some water flowing and a cat that jumps around your feet.”
Following the United States’ hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban took over Kabul. That’s when the shutters of Zahra’s world slammed shut.
First, the Taliban revoked her license for working as a TV journalist. Then, more and more restrictions piled on: women were forbidden from entering parks, forbidden from studying and working, forbidden from going outside without a male guardian, forbidden from speaking in public, forbidden from singing.
In the midst of these restrictions, the café became a refuge for Zahra and other women across Kabul – the last remaining place they could still gather and gossip and joke.
“We go and sit there and get a lot of energy,” said Zahra. “We feel like we’re free.”
A few weeks ago, Zahra went to the café with her friend. The two women ordered, settled into their seats, and exchanged pleasantries before Zahra’s companion leaned forward, her expression grave.
“You know what happened?”
Zahra shook her head.
“The Taliban imprisoned my brother,” she confided, her voice shaking.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. They’re framing him for something he didn’t do.”
As her friend continued explaining the circumstances of her brother’s kidnapping, Zahra noticed a presence behind her. It was another woman. She was dressed like everyone else in the café, covered head to toe in a burqa, but there was something off about her. A certain tension.
“You can keep talking. I’m not listening,” urged the peculiar woman, her tone snide.
Panic swelled in Zahra’s chest, expanding like a balloon. Who was this woman? Why was she so close to them? Why had she just touched her neck like that – did she have a recording device hidden underneath the fabric? There were many Taliban informants – often beggars slipped some change to eavesdrop and report back. Was she one of them? Would the two of them be arrested and tortured, like the hundred other women who had vanished into thin air over the last few weeks? Why couldn’t Zahra and her friend and the women of Afghanistan be left alone to breathe, just for a minute?
~
To be a woman in Afghanistan is to survive with every aspect of life threatened or forbidden, from the frivolous joys to the basic needs.
For Zahra, it starts as soon as she wakes up. Gazing in the mirror, she peers at the stray hairs around her eyebrows, the uncolored roots of her hair, the split ends framing her shoulders. She can’t help but think of the salons that once served as venues for women to pamper themselves and exchange stories. The salon she used to go to before the Taliban came back had wood paneling and dark green chairs. Zahra would recline and sigh out her stress as the beauticians waxed and plucked and threaded and washed and cut and dried. She would emerge feeling like a new woman.
When the Taliban banned salons, women surreptitiously started private beauty businesses in their homes. Zahra would sometimes sneak over to a secret home beauty salon. But these undertakings failed to bestow the same sense of bliss. Hairdressers were worried their customers were Taliban informants. Customers were scared they would be accused of colluding against the regime.
Zahra once accompanied her sister to a secret salon to get her hair colored. When the dye was in, slick and layered in her sister’s hair, the beautician was consumed by panic.
“Please, go home and wash your hair,” she requested. “I am sorry.”
So Zahra called a taxi for herself and her sister, hair still full of dye under her veil, to rush home mid-beauty treatment.
~
The next step in Zahra’s routine is getting dressed. Standing in front of her closet, she fingers her old clothes, dresses of all lengths and colors, from yellows to pinks to greens. She keeps many of them in a box, tucked away, but can’t convince herself to get rid of them. “I will keep this,” she had thought four years ago, when the Taliban took over. “Though I don’t know when I’ll wear it next.”
She still has no idea.
Since the Taliban Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice banned women’s bare faces in 2024, the only clothing Zahra can wear outside is a black burqa. The mesh over her eyes dims everything she sees. The fabric covering her mouth and nose inhibits every breath. She feels suffocated.
~
Venturing outside, Zahra sometimes catches a glimpse of “TV Mountain,” a nickname for a summit in the outskirts of Kabul with a halo of satellites and broadcast towers. Most of them are now defunct.
Zahra’s job once involved these towers. An accomplished journalist, she worked for a 24/7 channel run by female journalists and catered to female viewers. As the Taliban hacked away at press freedoms, many of Zahra’s colleagues fled Afghanistan, evacuating to safer shores in Germany, Canada, France, and the United States. But when they asked Zahra to join, her answer was defiant.
“I will remain.”
Zahra eventually had to decommission the studio; it had sat there, immobilized, sucking rent money from Zahra’s savings after her job dissipated. She had hoped paying rent to preserve the space even after her colleagues evacuated would help it reboot when the station was granted broadcast rights again. But as the months wore away and the Taliban cracked down even harder on the media, Zahra’s hope dissipated too.
~
Now, Zahra works with international NGOs as a gender specialist. She tells the Taliban she is teaching women from the rural provinces about agriculture and self-sufficiency, an essential skill given the region’s climate change induced droughts and food scarcity.
But her trainings include an important, non-Taliban sanctioned bonus lesson: how to fight sexual abuse. She trains women to train others in their communities. So far, they’ve reached at least 500 women around the country.
Yet, this work is plagued with challenges. For Zahra’s most recent gender training, dozens of women traveled from their homes in far away villages to Kabul, accompanied by their legally mandated mahrams (male chaperones). The women journeyed along the arid roads, dwarfed by the shadows of the Hindu Kush.
But while in transit, the Taliban cut off the internet. The women were left trundling across the country with no idea what was happening – a regime change? An invasion? Even after they made it to their hotels, no one could focus on the training: the women were worried sick about their families, who were in turn worried sick about them.
Despite the hurdles every step of the way, Zahra perseveres. She knows that although it is near impossible to collect data on healthcare in Afghanistan, rates of child marriage, sexual abuse, and femicide are high. There was already little healthcare for women after the Taliban takeover, and this dearth was magnified when US aid cuts forced the closure of many of the country’s women’s health clinics.
Zahra has heard stories – like that of a pregnant woman who started to bleed but couldn’t find a mahram to accompany her to a clinic, so the Taliban threw her in jail in the midst of her medical emergency. Another woman wasn’t so lucky; facing a similar issue, she and her unborn child died on the way.
~
It was a story of similar tragedy, one that cruelly uprooted many lives, that Zahra was listening to back in the café with the glowing string lights and gurgling water fountain. But such stories are not safe to tell as a woman in Kabul.
As soon as Zahra suspected the woman behind her was a spy, she and her friend got up and went inside. The woman followed them.
The pair sat in silence, bursting with things to say but paralyzed by fear. Zahra considered bringing her friend home, but this too was unsafe. She knew people who had been kidnapped and tortured for welcoming an old friend into their home. At every corner, someone was listening, waiting for an opportunity to take her away from her beloved work, her beloved home, her beloved country.
Zahra’s beautiful green sanctuary had morphed into a trap. Sullen, she went home.
~
The daylight illuminates Zahra’s room – the treadmill that has replaced strolls along Kabul’s storied streets, the shelf stacked with books that has replaced lectures at universities, the couch, draped in a bright pink throw, that has replaced the cafes where she would gather with her friends, talking and laughing into the night.
These days, Zahra avoids going outside. The Taliban are everywhere, spying on passerbys, arresting people at random, toting machine guns and harassing women for their clothing or conduct. Out in the street, Zahra spirals into a black hole of mental despair. The Taliban will never leave this country. They will be here for 100 years.
“Whenever I go out,” she said, “I want to die.”
So Zahra stays at home. She orders food delivery, wears her old clothes, reads, exercises, watches movies, and hopes for better days. From her window, she can glimpse the leafy tops of trees in a park she is banned from entering. She longs to touch their bark.
Most days, she does not see a single soul.
Like this, the days pass. The light fades and the sun sets, and the room that has become Zahra’s world falls into darkness again.
~
** Zahra’s last name and other identifying details have been omitted to protect her from Taliban retaliation.