The Taliban and I

Sushmita married Jaanbaz in secret and then fled to Afghanistan in 1989. The Cold War was coming to an end around then. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had begun to withdraw from Afghanistan, plunging the country into a bloody civil war, which prepared the ground for the rise of the Taliban. This was the Afghanistan Sushmita arrived in as Saheb Kamal, the name given to her by Jaanbaz's family.

The Taliban and I is Sushmita's explosive account of her life in Afghanistan, and the horrors visited upon her when she broke the boundaries set by a brutally patriarchal society. She lurched from one attack to another, making failed attempts to escape to India, and becoming, each time, less and less the ordinary Bengali bride that she was and more and more a rebel with a mission.