But at least I was not surprised by it.

And not being surprised helped me in a strange way to manage it.

What I want you to understand about those interrogation sessions is not primarily the physical element.

What I want you to understand is the particular goal of what they were trying to do which was not only to get information and it was to get recantation.

They wanted me to say formally in front of witnesses that I was returning to Islam that I renounced Jesus that I acknowledged I had been deceived and was now correcting my error.

This was the thing they pressed most consistently across all the sessions.

The information about the others was secondary to this primary objective.

I did not give it to them not because I was strong.

I want to be clear about this.

I was not strong.

I was terrified.

I was in pain.

There were moments during those sessions when the recantation was so close to the surface of my mouth that I could feel the shape of the words.

But each time I got to that point, something stopped me.

Something that was not courage in any conventional sense, but was more like clarity.

The same clarity I had felt that first night in my bedroom when I knew something real had come into the room.

Whatever else I was unsure of, I was not unsure of that.

And I could not deny a thing I was not unsure of after the formal interrogation sessions ended.

And I do not know exactly when that transition happened because the days had already begun blurring.

I was moved to the cell.

The cell was approximately 2 m by 2 1/2 m.

I know this because I paced it many times in the early days when I still had the physical capacity to pace.

The walls were concrete.

There was a small opening near the ceiling on one wall that provided ventilation and some light, but not much of either.

The floor was concrete.

There was nothing on the floor.

No mat, no blanket.

Later, after some time, a thin blanket appeared for pushed under the door without explanation.

It was not enough for the cold, but it was something.

There was a bucket in the corner which served as a toilet.

Someone removed and replaced it periodically.

The smell in the cell was what you would expect.

There were other prisoners in adjacent cells.

I could hear them but not see them.

Mostly men.

Occasionally there were sounds that I will not describe.

At night it was cold and dark and the sounds of the other prisoners, their coughing, their sleep, occasionally their crying became the texture of the darkness.

The deliberate starvation began as far as I can reconstruct.

Within the first week, it was not immediately clear to me that it was a policy.

At first, I thought it was disorganization or that food for prisoners was simply inconsistent in this kind of informal facility.

I I would see guards moving around would smell food from somewhere else in the compound and nothing would come to my cell.

This happened for several days in a row.

Then one of the guards told me directly what was happening.

He came to the cell door.

They had a small sliding panel in the door that they could open and he told me that it had been decided I would not be fed.

He explained the reasoning without apparent emotion.

I had rejected Islam which meant I had rejected God which meant I was already spiritually dead.

And a spiritually dead man did not require food.

they would not waste resources on me.

He said they were giving me time to change my mind and that if I changed it and recanted the situation would change.

If I did not, it would not.

He slid the panel closed and walked away.

I I sat on the floor of the cell for a long time after that.

I was already hungry in but several days with almost nothing had made certain of that.

Now I understood that the that the hunger was not an accident but a mechanism.

A mechanism designed to do one of two things.

Break my faith before it killed my body or kill my body in a way that is very strange to explain knowing the intention behind it helped me more than it frightened me because it was no longer uncertainty.

It was a clearly defined situation and I have always been better with defined situations than with formless fear.

I want to take you through what the weeks felt like as accurately as I can.

Not to make you feel sorry for me, but because I think it is important for people to understand what this kind of suffering is actually like.

But rather than imagining it through a movie lens that makes it bearable by making it beautiful.

It was not beautiful.

It was very ordinary and very physical and very slow.

The first 10 days without proper food, the body is angry.

There is real sharp persistent pain in the stomach.

The hunger is loud.

Your mind focuses on food in a way that is almost involuntary.

You start remembering specific meals, specific smells with a clarity and a vividness that almost feels like hallucination, but it’s really just the brain’s way of expressing what the body needs.

I thought about my mother’s cooking.

I thought about specific meals, the smell of karma on a cold day, the particular way Mariam made bologani on Friday mornings.

The mind goes to very concrete and specific places.

During this period, I prayed, but the prayers were effortful in a way they had not been before.

Hunger makes concentration difficult.

I found myself starting a prayer and losing the thread of it.

Finding myself somewhere else had having to pull myself back.

I would recite verses I had memorized simply to give my mind something to hold on to.

The 23rd Psalm.

Parts of the gospels I had committed to memory.

I recited them the way you hold onto a railing on a steep staircase.

Not with spiritual inspiration necessarily, just with need.

The guards or some of them developed a particular cruelty during this period.

They would sometimes open the panel in the door at meal times from other parts of the compound when food smells were strongest and hold food near the opening, not offering it, just letting the smell in.

and and asked if I was ready to talk.

I do not think this was something they had been specifically instructed to do.

I think some of them enjoyed it.

This is also part of what imprisonment does.

It gives small authority to people who might not otherwise have it.

And some people do ugly things with small authority.

This is not unique to Taliban guards.

It is a very human thing and a very sad one.

By the second and third week, the body enters a different phase.

The loud angry hunger becomes quieter in a way that is itself frightening because you understand dimly that the quiet is not the pain listening but the body beginning to use itself.

Your thinking changes.

It becomes slower.

It takes longer to follow a thought from beginning to end.

Physical movement becomes costly.

Standing up from the floor becomes a process that takes planning and effort.

I slept more or tried to, though the cold made sustained sleep difficult.

My prayer life during these weeks was strangely the most honest it has ever been in my life.

Not the most eloquent, not the most theologically sophisticated, the most honest because I did not have the energy for anything other than the direct thing.

No preamble, no Polish language, just I am here.

I am cold.

I am hungry.

I don’t know if I can do this.

Are you here? That was most of my prayer for weeks.

just that I just the bare minimum of reaching towards something I hoped was there.

There were also moments during this period when I was very angry.

Angry at God.

I will not pretend there were not.

Angry in the way you are angry at someone you believe exists and has the power to act and is not acting.

I said angry things in the privacy of that cell.

I accused God in those whispered prayers of things of abandonment, of cruelty, of not being what he had seemed to be.

I said these things and then sat in the silence after them.

And in the silence something held me that was not my own will holding myself.

Something steadier than me met the anger and did not collapse under it.

And that was its own kind of answer.

By the fourth week, the physical deterioration was serious.

I knew this not from any medical assessment, but from my own body’s communication, which becomes very direct when you are in this condition.

My muscles were losing substance.

Sitting on the concrete floor had become painful in a new way because there was less cushion between bone and surface.

My hair was coming out when I ran my hand through it.

The cold felt colder than it had in the first weeks, which I understood was related to the loss of fat and the body’s reduced ability to maintain warmth.

I had also begun to lose track of time in a more complete way.

The small panel of light from the ceiling opening told me when it was day and when it was night, but beyond that, the days had become a texture rather than a sequence.

I tried to keep count by marking scratches on the wall with my thumbnail, but I was not always consistent, and the count I was keeping by the middle of the ordeal was probably not precise.

Around what I think was the fifth week, a guard, a different one younger, who I had not seen often, slid something through the lower gap under the door when he passed.

It was a small piece of bread, dry, not much, but real.

He did not say anything.

He did not stop walking.

He just pushed it through the gap and kept going.

I never saw him do it again.

I ate that bread very slowly, carefully.

The way you treat something precious, and I wept while I ate it, not dramatically, just the quiet tears of a man who has been without basic human kindness for a long time and then encounters one small unearned piece of it.

I do not know why that guard did it.

I have no way of knowing.

I have prayed for him whoever he was.

I believe God can use any person to do any small thing at any moment when it is needed.

I as I move deeper into the sixth and seventh weeks, there were periods where I was no longer entirely present in a normal way.

I want to be very careful about how I describe this because I do not want to claim things I cannot verify or make it sound more supernatural than I can honestly present.

What I can tell you is that there were periods during those last weeks where my consciousness was not operating in normal or consistent way.

Whether this was the result of starvation induced delirium or sleep deprivation or hypothermia or some combination of all of these things.

I cannot tell you scientifically.

Probably it was all of those things.

During those periods I experienced something that I can only describe as not being alone in the cell.

Not in a visual way.

I did not see anyone but a sense of presence.

Felt the same quality of presence I had felt in my bedroom that first night years ago, but much stronger and much more sustained.

A warmth that the physical temperature of the cell did not account for.

A sense of something steady next to me in the dark.

I know how this sounds to someone approaching it skeptically.

I also know what I experienced and I am describing it as plainly as I can.

I also had what I can only describe as a deep settled peace during some of those periods.

An absence of fear that was not the same as the absence of fear you have when nothing is threatening you.

But the absence of fear you have when something is absolutely threatening you and you are somehow not afraid of it anyway.

I cannot manufacture that.

It was not something I talked myself into.

It was simply there and I was simply in it.

By approximately day 40 I could no longer stand unaded.

I moved from a sitting position to lying down and staying mostly lying down because the effort of changing position was significant.

My prayers at this point were almost nonverbal.

I was not sure I was forming full sentences in my own mind.

I was mostly just directing myself toward God.

The way you face toward a light source even when you cannot see clearly just facing just turning toward at some point in those final days I cannot tell you the precise timing.

I stopped praying for rescue.

I had not consciously decided to stop.

I had simply run out of the structure that request required.

And what replaced it was something much simpler which was let me not be alone when this ends.

Whatever this ends into, let me not be alone in it.

And I was not I was not alone in it.

That is all I can tell you.

I I was not alone.

I was lying on the floor of the cell.

I did not know what day it was.

I did not know very clearly what was happening around me.

I was not afraid.

And then the door opened.

The door opened and I did not respond to it.

I was aware of it.

Aware that the door was open.

That light was coming in that was different from the usual small amount of light.

But I did not have the the capacity to respond to it.

My body had reduced itself to the most basic functions.

moving toward something, responding to something.

Those were not things I could do.

I heard voices, more than one person.

I heard the particular quality in a voice when a person is surprised by something.

Not alarm exactly, but the vocal register of someone confronting something unexpected.

I understand now that what surprised them was that I appeared to be dead.

from my stillness, my physical state, my color.

I have been told since by people who have worked with severe starvation cases that a person in the final stages looks a particular way, that the body has been communicating death even before actual death arrives.

One of the men came closer.

I was aware of him closer to me.

And then I made some kind of sound.

I do not know what kind.

I have no clear memory of what I produced.

But it was enough.

It was enough to change the atmosphere in that room very quickly.

The voices became louder.

Different voices.

It seemed like more people came to the doorway.

But there was a quality to what was happening around me that I can only describe as confusion.

Not the practiced confusion of a procedure being followed, but the genuine confusion of people who did not know what they were looking at or what to do about it.

I want to be careful about what I claim here and what I don’t.

I am not going to tell you that I saw an angel standing in the cell or that a voice from the sky spoke to the guards and they were struck with awe.

I do not know exactly what each person in that room saw or experienced.

What I know is what happened next and that what happened next was not what should have happened next by any logic of the system I was inside.

There was a prisoner in the cell next to mine.

I will call him Rosam.

He was not a Christian.

He was there for reasons having nothing to do with faith.

I lost some connection to the to the previous government.

I think though I never knew the details.

We had spoken occasionally through the wall in brief exchanges and whispered Dari just enough to know we existed on either side of the same concrete.

He was eventually released sometime after I was and through a chain of people that I will not trace in detail, we eventually communicated once I was outside the country.

what Rosam told me from what he had been able to observe.

And here in the adjacent cell during the final days of my imprisonment was that by the last few days the guards had stopped going in.

They would check through the door panel, see no movement, and leave.

He said that on at least one day he heard the guards talking to each other outside and the gist of what they said was that the man in that cell was finished.

Find that they were discussing what would be done with the body.

There was discussion about timing about who would be responsible for the removal about keeping it quiet.

Rostam also told me something else.

He said that during those last days, the other prisoners in the cells nearby, there were three or four people in that section of the facility.

All noticed something that none of them could account for.

He said there was a quality to the air in that section of the building, particularly near my cell that was different.

He described it as warm.

He said that several of the other prisoners, men of different backgrounds, at least one of whom was, he said, a fairly harsh and unscentimental person, remarked on it.

One of them asked a guard about it.

The guard had no explanation.

I do not know what to do with this information except to share it as it was shared with me exactly as plainly as Rostam told it to me.

I am not claiming a scientific explanation.

I am not claiming to know exactly what occurred.

I am only telling you what was witnessed by other human beings who had no reason to report it in the direction of the miraculous and who did report it.

What I know is that when the guards came that morning expecting to remove a body and found instead a living man barely living but living that it created a problem they were not equipped to handle.

The days that followed the morning they found me alive.

I am going to tell you this period honestly which means admitting that my memory of it is fragmentaryary and not entirely reliable.

I was in a very compromised state.

What I am about to describe is a reconstruction built from my fragments and from what I was later told by people who were part of what happened.

Sometime after the morning, the guards found me alive.

I began receiving water.

Small amounts brought to the cell.

Then after a day or more, something like food, watery, minimal, but something.

I was not able to eat much at first.

The body after prolonged starvation cannot simply receive food and process it normally.

The refeeding has to be slow or it causes its own serious harm.

Whoever made the decision to give me something must not have known or cared about that particular medical nuance.

But the amounts were small enough that it did not make things worse.

My consciousness became more consistent over the following days.

Uh not normal, not anything close to what I would have called normal 2 months before, but more present, more continuous.

I was aware of where I was.

I was aware of time passing in a more order way.

I was aware that something had shifted in the situation around me.

Though I could not have told you what or why, the guards who interacted with me during the period were noticeably different in their manner from what I remembered of the weeks before.

Not kind, I would not use that word, but less certain of themselves.

the way people act when they are not sure of the rule anymore.

When the situation has moved outside the procedures they understood, there was a weariness in how they approached the cell door that had not been there before.

I was aware of it even in my compromised state.

I heard conversations outside the cell, not clearly then not completely but fragments.

There seemed to be disagreement about what to do with me.

This is consistent with what I learned later, which was that my continued existence had become a complication within the facility.

The intention had been that I would not survive.

That I had survived created a question of what happened next.

And the question was not a simple one because doing anything overt at that point carried risks of attention that the people running the facility did not want.

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