In 1977, Meena began a resistance movement to fight for women’s rights and defy imperial occupation in Afghanistan.

ONLY ONE CLIP of Meena speaking — flickering, faded, just a few minutes long — survives today, and it sounds like a prophecy. It is 1981. She is 24, in a pale blue turtleneck and a dark blue dotted pinafore, her wavy hair cropped short.

Meena had just delivered a speech in Valence, where she was invited by the new French Socialist government to represent the Afghan resistance movement at a party congress. Her speech so angered the Soviet delegation — the USSR had invaded Afghanistan two years earlier, and she spoke forcefully against the occupation — that they stalked out, glowering, as she raised a victory sign in the air.

In the clip, a snippet from an interview with a Belgian news channel, she predicts — calmly, sombrely, pen in hand — the victory of anti-Soviet forces. But she also warns of its cost: that the anti-democratic, misogynistic factions of the mujahideen being valorised by the West in their fight against the Soviets would, in turn, devour Afghanistan.

Amid the clumsy binaries of war, Meena was treading a tricky path.

Meena was born in 1956, in the final decades of Mohammed Zahir Shah’s reign. The modernist king had nudged along a number of firsts for women: female voices on Afghan radio, voluntary abolition of the chadar, and ratification of the constitution by a Loya Jirga — a grand legal assembly — that included women.

She attended one of Kabul’s best schools — the Lycee Malalai, named after a beloved folk heroine who rallied flailing Afghan forces to victory against the British in 1880 — but in her middle-class home, she saw her father periodically beat her two mothers.

Uncommonly alert to injustice — her relatives’ casual mistreatment of Hazara servants, of the educational disparities between her architect father and her unlettered mother — teenage Meena became increasingly fixated on the inferior status of women.

How men saw women and how women saw themselves — as individuals with their own hopes and dreams, rather than in perpetual service to the family, the tribe, and the nation — would not be transformed by state mandates alone. These roles would have to be renegotiated, Meena knew, by Afghan women themselves, from within the most fundamental unit of society, the family.

It is 1976. Three years earlier, the old king had been overthrown by his cousin, and the 225-year-old monarchy was replaced with an autocratic one-party state. Kabul University, where Meena is now studying law, is a microcosm of the forces buffeting Afghanistan: Marxists and Maoists, monarchists and Islamic revivalists.

Meena, 20, is married to a doctor 11 years older, the only man her family could find who fit her criteria: no bride price, no second wife, no objection to school or work. He is the leader of a Maoist group. Meena also leans left, but she is not interested in being relegated to the women’s wing of a political outfit. She seeks an organisation that centres the liberation of Afghan women.

There is none, so she starts one herself. It is called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).

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