The cell had no ventilation. At the top of the door, at the highest point, there was a window set close to the ceiling, covered with a perforated metal sheet. The tiny holes in the sheet would allow the thinnest strands of sunlight to promise morning, and as the sun’s golden rays disappeared, they would signal the coming of night.

The most delusional element of solitary confinement is time itself. The hands of the clock are gone; day and night pass without measure. Time becomes nothing but a narrow beam of light slipping through the small holes in a metal sheet. I didn’t dare take an afternoon nap, because I would lose my grip on time entirely. In the outside world, such a nap might last only minutes – but inside the cell, within the confines of my shackled mind, it felt as though years had passed. When I woke up, I didn’t know if it was still today, if I had slipped back into yesterday, or if I had already arrived at tomorrow.

A cell is also heavy. I don’t think anything in this world compares to the density of a cell, and inside that density, time feels compressed and wrinkled. When you stare at the tiny holes in the metal sheet, hoping to catch the slightest change to remind you that time is passing, nothing shifts. There is no sign of movement. It’s as if time itself is standing still, staring back at you. You sit, stand, walk, sit, stand, walk – again and again – but time doesn’t move at all.

When night falls, it feels as if you’ve lived a whole year – as if this stretch of time you’ve endured cannot possibly belong to a single day; it must surely be the sum of many. In a cell, time itself can drive a person to madness.

Occasionally, the ringing of a bell shattered the cell’s abrasive silence and broke through the long, echoing loneliness of the solitary confinement corridor. When the interrogators come for their victim – their accused, their prisoner – they do not enter the women’s corridor; they are men. Instead, they ring the bell, and a female warden retrieves the prisoner and escorts her towards the interrogation rooms in another part of the prison.

When the doorbell echoed, thus my heart raced. The shuffle of the female warden’s plastic slippers drilled into my brain. She walked to the door, paused for a few minutes to speak with the interrogator, then returned with the same shuffling sound. She passed the first cell, then the second, and continued down the row until she stopped in front of mine. My heartbeat quickened even more. All right – the interrogator had come for me this time. I was ready.

A voice rang out: “Get up. Get ready.”

A blindfold and a chador were thrown into the cell. The warden then waited, watched, and gave orders: “Put on your coat and pants.”

I put on the loose dark-blue clothes made of a plastic-like material. I hated it; my skin always reacted to them, but I had no choice. The prison had also given me a pair of short, worn-out, torn, thin socks, and I reluctantly put those on too. Then I put on a dark blue maghnae, a fitted Islamic covering for hair, neck and shoulders, picked up the chador and the blindfold from the floor, and prepared to step out of the cell. “No!” the warden said. “You have to put on your chador and blindfold before you come out.”

I did as I was told, put on the chador – white and patterned with flowers – tied the blindfold, slipped on the old, torn plastic slippers, and followed the female warden. At the end of the corridor hung a dirty, foul-smelling tarpaulin curtain – because we were women and the men shouldn’t see into our ward. Every time I passed it, I felt nauseated.

At the door, I heard a man’s voice say to the female warden, “Thank you very much, sister.” From that point on, he took custody of me.

We began walking through the main corridor of the prison complex. On one side were rows of solitary confinement cells, on the other, the interrogation rooms. Through these walks to interrogation, I realised that more than 10 corridors branched off from the main one. Each held about five cells: two very small ones at the beginning and end, and three or four medium-sized ones in the middle.

I entered the interrogation room, still blindfolded, suspended in the centre of the space, until a man’s voice brought me back to my senses.

“Go forward. Take the seat and sit.”

There was a plastic chair in front of me. I sat down slowly. Everything felt vague, strange, painfully foreign. The stench of hatred filled the room. I couldn’t breathe. Not even curiosity pushed me to move my hands or feet or turn my neck. On that interrogation chair, in front of those men, I sat frozen like a block of ice.

Then the interrogation session began.

In the interrogation room, when I lifted my blindfold, I saw a man seated behind a small wooden desk in the corner. My chair stood opposite his. While my mouth was dry, he began speaking harshly, aggressively, his voice soaked in threats.

“Well, Ms Mohammadi, you’ll be staying with us for a while,” he said.

“For how long?”

“Don’t ask. No one knows. It depends on you. If you cooperate, you’ll go back to your children.”

“Cooperate?” I asked.

“Yes. The Defenders of Human Rights Center is an American espionage project,” he started.

After each interrogation, the interrogator would hand me the end of his prayer beads. Sometimes they smelled of rosewater, sometimes of sweat, and I would now follow behind him, holding them, back toward my cell.

In most Iranian households, prayer beads were objects of devotion – used to remember God. The prayer beads of my grandparents, resting on their clean, fragrant prayer rugs, were part of my sweetest childhood memories.

Now, every time I held the end of those beads, all I felt was repulsiveness.

Solitary confinement is one of the great unknowns – and once it envelopes you, it fills you with terror and dread. Before my arrest, one of our activities had been protesting the use of solitary confinement against our family members.

Among our group of activists was the wife of a detainee. She was a well-known psychiatrist with detailed knowledge of what was to be known as “white torture”. She shared precise information about her husband’s condition and, drawing on her professional expertise, explained how solitary confinement systematically breaks a person down psychologically through isolation, fear, and sensory deprivation. It attacks the mind rather than the body, leaving deep and long-lasting trauma.

Now it was my turn.

Earlier, I had heard one detainee’s wife describe the solitary cell as a grave, and another prisoner had said that solitary confinement felt like being submerged in freezing water: he could see his hand turning numb and icy, yet was unable to pull it out. For me, it felt like being a child trapped in the arms of a monster. Every time I imagined its face, anxiety flooded my entire being.

For the first few days, I was not allowed any fresh air. I was stuck in the cell the whole time. When a man opened the cell and ordered me to put my blindfold on and start walking for interrogation, I felt like a stranger stepping on to an unknown planet. It was as if gravity itself had shifted and intensified, forcing me to exert enormous effort just to move. I walked slowly and cautiously. I could not see what lay ahead.

Not seeing breeds fear. And fear, in an environment of terror and repression, easily multiplies. To fight tyranny and oppression is always hard. But when you are bereft of all choice, when your agency approaches zero, and you are placed in front of power at its most potent and non-negotiable – the struggle becomes something else entirely. It becomes deadly.

Such a condition is like a world of unknowns. Over time, you no longer even recognise yourself. The blindfold and orders are dreadful, and the heavy, clanging metal door – which opens only from the other side, by the will and hand of the jailer – is not truly a door. A door implies possibility: it could be opened, or closed, entered, or exited, by your choosing. In solitary confinement, the door becomes something else. It hardens and becomes more merciless than the concrete walls, because it is what holds you back.

Even a simple medical checkup became an ordeal, requiring clearance from multiple security and judicial agencies. [As I suffered multiple medical emergencies], prison officials would sometimes admit secretly that they didn’t understand the level of extreme control being imposed on me, claiming they were under pressure from higher authorities.

Due to years of imprisonment, I had come to understand that the medical neglect was not an accident, but a deliberate strategy to silently eliminate opposition. Authoritarian regimes do not always need an executioner’s rope. Sometimes, they simply wait for the human body to fail – and then make sure no help arrives, or they create conditions in which death can come easily, helping it along by standing in the way of life-saving care.

Note from the editor

These writings by Narges Mohammadi were smuggled out – often by fellow prisoners and visitors, at extraordinary risk to their own lives – during her time as a prisoner in Iran’s notorious Evin, Qarchak and Zanjan prisons. They form part of her autobiography, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, due to be published later this year. Mohammadi has been arrested 14 times for her activism in Iran, which has focused on women’s rights and ending the regime’s use of the death penalty. She has already been sentenced to more than 40 years in prison and 154 lashes across several convictions, and faces a further 18 years in prison. The campaigner was awarded the Nobel peace prize while still in prison in 2023, during the “Woman, life, freedom” protests.

In December 2024, Mohammadi was released on a temporary sentence suspension after suffering a series of health crises in prison, but was violently rearrested a year later during another regime crackdown on dissent, and sentenced to years more prison time in February this year. Mohammadi’s health deteriorated severely over the course of 2026, with her weight dropping more than 20kg. She was found unconscious in her cell after suffering an apparent heart attack in March.

For weeks, requests by her family and doctors for her to receive proper medical treatment from her team of surgeons in were denied. On Sunday, she was released on bail to receive treatment from her medical team in Tehran. She remains in a critical condition.

Her family say that her continuing detention, and the refusal of proper medical care, constitute a “slow execution”.