With two fingers missing from his right hand, Afghan writer Reza Khorami struggles to tap out stories on his keyboard.
The Taliban lopped off his forefinger in 2014 because it was covered in indelible ink showing Khorami had voted.
The tip of the middle finger was also splashed with the purple dye, so was also amputated.
The crude punishment, part of the Taliban's war on Afghan democracy, did not deter a defiant Khorami from voting in Saturday's first round of the presidential election, which pitted Afghan President Ashraf Ghani against his top rival, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah.
"I voted again in 2019 just to show that I have not surrendered to terrorism," Khorami told AFP this week in Kabul, where he writes fiction.
"They can cut our fingers, but they cannot kill our morale."
"The next day, they took us to a mosque. An old man was sat there and he had a knife and some basic medications. They said: 'We won't kill you, but will cut off your finger as a lesson for other people who participated in the election'."