Seven months after the Taliban takeover, I was living with my husband’s family in a three-room apartment located in a remote township in Kabul. The window of my room opened onto the courtyard. That winter, when I drew back the curtain every morning, I saw piles of snow, with more falling day after day. The apartment had no central heating. Electricity was often cut during the day, so we could not use the electric heater to keep warm. The price of gas had skyrocketed. We tried to stay warm by wearing layers of clothing and wrapping ourselves in blankets. We ate in the one room where a single gas heater was lit.
I was six months pregnant, and my legs were painfully restless; any contact with something cold made the discomfort and pain worse. The nights were long and bitterly cold. We fell asleep listening to audiobooks. It was during those bleak nights that we began listening to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I don’t know how closely my husband followed its story, but, for me, guided by the voice of the narrator — a woman calmed me with her soothing voice — I was moving from the Gilead of Afghanistan I had fallen into to the fictional Gilead that Margaret Atwood had created.
I saw myself in the figure of Offred, assigned to serve the continuation of men’s bloodlines. As the female narrator spoke of Offred’s life, and as Offred spoke of Moira, lying on my side became an ordeal for my entire body. I was nurturing a living being inside me while I myself struggled to draw breath.
It was as if I was not truly living during those long days and nights, but trapped inside a strange, suffocating horror film. I held a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and had countless work documents proving that I had been employed and a trained professional only months earlier.
The new rulers regarded the presence of women in public spaces as a sin. Women were told to be cautious about leaving the house, to observe hijab rules, and move around in public with a male guardian.
Women were also removed from their workplaces, supposedly to spare them hardship. In those seven months after the Taliban seized control, enormous changes had taken place. Women no longer went to work. Women had no income. Women were forbidden from studying beyond the sixth grade. With each passing day, a new decree was issued, designed to enforce more control over women’s lives.
I don’t know how long it took me to finish The Handmaid’s Tale, but every night, as I lay in our freezing, cold bed, I would resume listening from the exact point where sleep had overtaken me the night before. Like Offred, a single meal in a good restaurant, meeting kindred friends, peaceful family gatherings — everything I had been able to do before August 2021 — felt like a distant dream. Like Offred and the group of Handmaids, I too was required to wear a specific uniform. I tried to resist. I refused to buy a black chador. Eventually, in June 2022, my sister gave me one of hers, and that was how I ended up wearing my first black chador, as mandated by the new rulers of Afghanistan.
During those nights and days filled with longing, I often thought about Margaret Atwood. Her mind astonished me. Everything in that book felt real, as though our lives had been predicted years earlier. The new government used religion and sacred texts to dictate how everything in society was to occur, each in a new and unacceptable form. Any defiance was met with severe punishment.
Overnight, on the very day of the fall of Kabul, women were pushed out of all social spheres. Banks froze accounts, and withdrawing money became a trial worthy of the seven labours of Rostam. I personally traveled from Khair Khana to Macroyan just to access cash, because other branches were always overcrowded and reaching the counter was nearly impossible.
In those days, I lived as Offred. I would leave the house for walks, during which I watched in disbelief how a city was transformed in just seven months. Everything appeared brutally ugly to me. Traveling from one part of the city to another felt like an impossible journey.
I kept wondering whether I would be able to give birth naturally. The doctor advised me to stay active and drink plenty of water if I wanted a natural delivery. The clinic I visited was, as always, crowded.
It was during those same days, when I was thinking about Margaret Atwood, that I reached into my bag of clothes and pulled out my laptop. I began to write so I could document what was happening. My daily one-hour walk became my primary source of news. In that single hour, walking through the Khair Khana pass, I saw things I had never seen before: the signs of women’s beauty salons were painted over in black; public transport drivers would allow a woman to sit alone in the front seat only if she paid the fare for two people; and people complained about everything in every line I stood in.
In August 2022, I began teaching at a private university. I was happy that women were still able to pursue higher education. Universities continued to operate, even though women’s and men’s class hours were segregated, and female students were required to closely monitor their hijab, their voices, and their movements. Even so, this continuation offered a measure of hope, until the universities were shut down in December 2022. The closure of universities pushed women yet another step further back. I became so exhausted and hopeless that every knock on my front door filled me with fear that someone had come to take me away.
I continued to write. I wrote many critical essays, but always using a pseudonym as using my real name was dangerous. In April 2024, a collection of my short stories was published outside the country. I undertook other forms of work, as well. Each, in its own way, was an act of resistance against suffocation. In the end, I could not endure living inside the country with a voice deemed aurat, a voice that was not supposed to be heard. In October 2024, I left the country.
I never stopped writing. In August 2025, my second collection of short stories was published in China. One Chinese journalist asked me how much of my stories had been inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale. That question took me back once more to those cold nights and to the voice of the woman narrating the lives of the Handmaids. In truth, Margaret Atwood had foreseen our lives in a geography in which women were classified and placed in the service of a system and of men. If women showed even the slightest resistance, their existence was deemed worthless, and they were meant to be erased.
Chinese readers of my stories also noted that the lives of Afghan women reminded them of The Handmaid’s Tale. Was it a reality that had found its way into a book, or a fictional story that had entered our lived reality? As Margaret Atwood herself has said, nothing in that book was fictional — everything had either already happened somewhere in the world or could happen just as easily and swiftly as the Taliban’s rise to power.
For those of us who lived through those days and survived, the question remains: how can women stop such people and with what tools? For me, as for Margaret Atwood, the answer was writing. I chose writing as my weapon, as a means to record images, carry voices, and document those strange and unfolding conditions so thoroughly that the possibility of their repetition might weaken, diminish, or disappear altogether.
I do not know how much power words hold, but I believe they carry the strong power to change. And we must not stop writing. We must not stop resisting.
Khadija Haidary is an editor at Zan Times.
