Marzia Adeel moved aside a tuft of her deep brown hair to reveal the red scar where a Taliban soldier hit her with a steel cable.
She had been buying shoes a few months ago. She couldn't see through the mesh of her robe and since there was only an elderly shoe salesman in the store, she took a risk and uncovered her head.
PHOTO: AFP
Suddenly two men burst in. One hit her with the cable. She fell back, struggled with her robe, but couldn't get it down fast enough. He hit her again.
"I was bleeding. I was scared," she said. "The man selling shoes was scared. He said `sister, please go, leave.' But I couldn't see. Blood was dripping in my eyes."
Speaking at close to a whisper, in the halting English she taught herself during five years of enforced idleness, Adeel told her story this week while waiting at Radio Afghanistan to apply for a job as a news reader. She also writes poems, and her tape of one of them had already been played on the radio.
Women on the air, a beauty salon reborn, and, from yesterday, no more sexual segregation in the hospitals; all are vivid evidence of the collapse of the Taliban social order.
Afghanistan was always a conservative place, and many women were wearing the burqa, the tent-like, all-enveloping robe, long before the Taliban arrived in 1996.
But the Taliban's extreme reading of Islamic law made the burqa mandatory. Women were barred from working, and girls older than eight couldn't go to school.
People were exhorted to paint their ground-floor windows black so women couldn't be seen by passers-by. White stockings were taboo because the Taliban's flag was white.
Women were not supposed to move outside their home without a male chaperone. That seemed to be one of the few rules women ignored. They were always seen in small groups, unescorted, seeming to drift along the streets in their billowing burqas.
After Humaira's beauty salon was shut by the Taliban, she hid her cans of hairspray, her portraits of coiffured women and her cracked hair dryer. A day after the northern alliance moved in to Kabul, Humaira reopened for business. The chairs were old and torn. The Taliban had smashed her larger mirrors. They had painted over her sign, objecting to the words "beauty salon."
"We were like in prison," she said. "We had no life, nothing for us to do. We were not people."
In recent days Humaira scraped the paint off her sign and put her posters back on the walls. One showing a sassy young woman her hair in heavily curled pigtails was the favorite of Humaira's daughter, Ghinza.
But the 7-year-old in red velvet pants and a jacket didn't see herself following her mother into hair styling. She thought she'd like to be an engineer. "I think I would build things for my country."
Shireen, 26, was a government statistician before the Taliban suddenly sent her home.
Now she was trudging from one government ministry to the next, looking for work. Like most women in Kabul, she still wore her burqa. Her gold-rimmed glasses were all that was visible behind the mesh. She said she was waiting for a regular government to take office and give official clearance to shed the burqa.
Until then, she remained cautious. She and several other women talked to a reporter only on condition that their surnames not be published.
The aviation ministry was closed, so Shireen went next door to Radio Afghanistan.
"Maybe I could get a job as a news reader," she said. "I am educated. I have to work. I must work to contribute to my country and to my family," she said through an interpreter. "I have the right to participate."
The medical profession also suffered under Taliban strictures.
At Rabia Balkhi hospital for women, female doctors were forbidden to work alongside their male colleagues. Starting Saturday, that rule is also dead, by order of the new health ministry. But there is a lot of catching-up to do.
"Our new women doctors are not properly trained," said Dr. Rahina Staniczai, the head of the hospital. The Taliban allowed women to take only three selected medical courses, at one hospital, and under strict supervision.
At Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, women were secluded on separate floors, hidden behind walls built by the Taliban. The walls are to be torn down yesterday.
Another applicant at the radio station, Parveen Hashafi, said that under Taliban rule "We were neither alive nor dead."
Single, jobless, her life was a monotonous routine of waking, eating, cleaning, sleeping, she said.
But she wondered whether the world that condemned the Taliban's treatment of women would now force Afghanistan to enshrine their rights in a constitution.
"Or, now that they have what they want, will they forget about us again?" she asked.
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