from NYTimes online
Dr. Asefi is an artist who, at great personal risk, had disguised the figures of human beings in 80 oil paintings at the gallery by applying a veneer of watercolor paint over them. He had thus saved the pictures from destruction at the hands of the Taliban, who had forbidden representations of the human form as sacrilege. Now, as an assortment of ministers, journalists, artists and local intellectuals looked on, Dr. Asefi, scrubbed up in a starchy new suit, approached a painting, dipped a cloth in water and began washing the watercolor away, revealing the original figures beneath, still intact.
There was applause all around.
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The great actress of pre-Taliban films was Zamzama Shakila, usually just called Zamzama, a gorgeous woman whose physical presence was particularly alarming to the Taliban. She wanted to stay in Afghanistan despite the Taliban; she gave up acting, and her husband (also an actor) sold clothes in the street. But Taliban agents hunted them down and in one attack by fundamentalists she took five bullets and he took seven, one of which is still embedded in his skull. They fled to Pakistan. For years she survived by singing for weddings in Peshawar. The day Kabul was taken, they came back.
"I was so thirsty for my country," she said.
She wore the burka for her trip back into Afghanistan; when she arrived in Kabul, she took it off and burned it in the street. She is one of the few women to go without cover today. "I hear women talking as they pass me, saying they admire my shedding my burka," she said. "I confront them and say: `Take yours off. Nothing terrible will happen.' Sometimes they throw off their burkas there, and we walk in the street together. Someone has to start this tendency."
cellomould
"In other words, your God is the warden of a prison where the only prisoner is your God." Jose Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ