Wearing a tight red dress, she runs towards a handsome Indian man. Her dark curls blow in the wind as she seductively dances around him. The Bollywood film has begun. So I can forget catching the attention of a tired-looking Afghan civil servant at the Ministry of Defence.

The civil servant sits behind his desk, with his eyes fixed on the screen. He sips his tea, without looking around. There are five other men in the small office who have dropped into their chairs behinds their desks. One of them speaks a little English, so my interpreter immediately turns around to watch the screen. The woman in the red dress touches the hero now and then, but when he tries to kiss her she quickly pulls away.

Indian Bollywood films are incredibly popular in Afghanistan. Men watch them at work, in tea houses and at home together with their wives (who watch the same film in a separate room if there are male guests). It is strange seeing these films in a country where many men have decided to hide their wives behind an all-concealing burka, and certainly would not allow them to dance in a park around a group of men. Women hardly play any role in public here.

At home
I wonder how Afghan men and women behave at home. Do they reenact Bollywood dramas? Women in Afghanistan do wear make-up, I know that from experience.

In Tarin Kowt as well as Kabul I saw heavily made up faces under their headscarves. In Tarin Kowt I even saw couples holding each other intensely on Thursday evenings, which is a night for going out just as Saturday is in the West, albeit within the walls of their mud houses. Perhaps the conspicuous pink, green and bright red glitter dresses in the shops are giving something away? And what about the stiletto heels in the shop windows?

Talking sexy
An Afghan, who owns a supermarket in Kabul and has just got engaged, refuses to wait until he is married and wants to talk sexy with the fiancé his parents choose for him.

He laughs like a schoolboy when he shows me a picture of a beautiful woman on the screen of his mobile phone. She could easily pass for a Bollywood star. But she is studying the Qur’an at a madrassa, he says disappointedly. She always puts up a protest when he phones her late at night and tries to seduce her. In response, she says, “Think of the Qur’an, Think of the Qur’an”. But in the end she lets him have his way.

“We spend hours on the phone. She lives in Jalalabad and I live in Kabul. We are not allowed to talk about it, because we are not married, but I do it anyway. We are just having fun. She finds it exciting and I want to get to know her, ” he says. Flirting mainly takes place on the quiet, in secret, often behind the high walls of the mud houses.

An Afghan film with these kinds of love scenes is unthinkable. Especially after watching the private TOLO TV station this week. For a while I thought there was something wrong with the television, but I soon discovered what was going on. The TV station’s bosses felt the Bollywood film went too far and intervened: the Indian woman’s body were covered with grey squares at breast height as she flitted across the screen singing and dancing.