ABSTRACT
When Afghanistan was under the Taliban, life was tense but time was slow.
When I first landed in Kabul, in the spring of 2001, I remember feeling as though I had just stepped back in time, or out of it, and was in a historical play about simpler but more brutal times. On the runway in Kabul, Taliban soldiers had stood languidly with their long black robes, beards, and rifles. They stared at us as we got off the plane and averted their eyes when some women doctors from an aid organization appeared. I remember how, as soon as the plane landed, some of the women on the plane-old hands in Afghanistanhad lifted their chadors over their heads and adjusted their clothes. We had walked over the tarmac, across the broken asphalt, into the dark, quiet Kabul airport. We sat in the damp visa office on weird furniture as a sad-looking Talib official thumbed through our passports. He looked up now and then to compare our faces with the pictures, narrowing his eyes and then making notes in his ledger. We had spoken softly, if at all, and we dared not laugh. A clock lightly ticked in the corner. I had felt like a child in a strict school.
