THE MANUSCRIPT OF ISMAIL

THE MANUSCRIPT OF ISMAIL

A Play in One Act

“Memory is not a photograph.

It is a manuscript rewritten every time it is read.”

CHARACTERS

All male characters are physically identical in age, height, and build — dressed in variations of the same clothes, as if the same man has been photographed in different lights.

The Examiner — A woman. Age indeterminate. Dressed formally. She sits behind a desk positioned upstage, slightly elevated, throughout the entire play. She does not speak. She does not explain herself.

Narrator

Ismail I — Ages 1–15

Ismail II — Ages 16–30

Ismail III — Ages 31–45

Ismail IV — Ages 46–60

Ismail V — Ages 61–75

Ismail VI — Ages 76–90

 

A NOTE ON STAGING

The play does not require naturalism. The six men may speak across one another, interrupt, contradict, or fall suddenly silent as if memory itself has stalled. Their bodies should never fully relax — there is always the faint tension of men listening for something they cannot quite hear.

The Examiner is present before the audience enters. She is already at her desk when the house lights go down. On her desk: papers she does not read, a glass of water she does not drink, a pen she does not use. She faces the six men but her gaze is not fixed on any one of them. She does not react — no small smiles, no frowns, no visible judgment. The discipline of her stillness is the most active presence on stage.

The Narrator stands apart from both groups — neither examiner nor examined.

SCENE

A dark stage. Upstage center: a plain desk, slightly elevated. The Examiner sits behind it. She is already there.

Downstage: six identical chairs arranged in a loose semicircle, slightly uneven — as if placed by memory rather than by design. Six men sit silently.

A soft light rises — the color of old paper, or late afternoon. The Examiner is illuminated separately, cooler, as if she exists in a different quality of time.

NARRATOR

These six men represent six fifteen-year intervals in the life of Ismail Niknam. You may be surprised that they are all the same age and shape. But consider: when we tell the story of a life, we flatten it. We reach for a representative image — the way statistics reach for a mean.

The woman at the desk has not been introduced. She will not introduce herself. She has been there from the beginning. She will be there at the end.

She may be the women in Ismail’s life who listened and kept their own counsel. She may be history, which is also a kind of examiner. She may be something else entirely. The play does not resolve this. Neither should you.

The six men are aware of her. They will speak as men speak when they know they are being assessed — which is to say, they will try to tell the truth, and they will try to present themselves well, and these two ambitions will not always be compatible.

The light narrows to a single pool. Ismail I sits at its center. The Examiner’s light remains constant throughout.

I.  The Well

ISMAIL I

I do not remember it myself. I was three years old. It was a summer afternoon. My mother was sleeping — that particular sleep of women in hot houses, deep and earning — and I woke up and slipped from her side like water through a hand. I went through the yard, past the woodshed where the kindling smelled of pine resin and old smoke, to the old kitchen at the back of the house.

There was a well there.

I climbed the stone lip. And then I fell.

But I did not fall into water. I fell into the bucket tied to the rope. I sat there in the dark, in that small wooden cradle, swinging slightly. I was crying, I think. Or perhaps I had already stopped. Perhaps the dark was interesting.

He glances at the Examiner. She does not look up.

ISMAIL III

Mother told that story many times. She said she woke up — that instant waking of a mother, no gradual surfacing — and found the room empty. She searched the house, then the yard. Then she went to your grandparents’ room, trembling so badly she had to hold the doorframe.

ISMAIL I

She was too afraid to go to the kitchen herself. She thought I was already dead. She thought she would find something she could not come back from.

ISMAIL III

My uncle went instead. He found you in the bucket, pulled you up hand over hand, the rope burning his palms. He carried you back to your mother without a word.

ISMAIL IV

I have heard this story all my life. At every family gathering — the well, the bucket, the rope, the uncle’s burned hands. But as I grew older, I began to wonder. Perhaps I never fell at all. Perhaps my uncle found me sitting in the kitchen eating dried apricots, quite happy, and later turned it into something more dramatic. Into something worth telling.

ISMAIL III

I remember another version. Father once said that when he built the house, a friend advised him to wall off the well — for the sake of the boy who would come. My father replied that the well’s stone lip was high enough, and that God would protect his child. Later, when the fall had become family legend, he used it as proof — not of negligence, but of faith. God had caught me in a bucket.

ISMAIL V

Notice what each version requires. Mother’s version needs a near-tragedy to justify her fear. Uncle’s version needs a rescue. Father’s version needs God. None of them needs me to simply be a child who climbed something he shouldn’t have.

ISMAIL I

I only know what I know: that I have never liked wells. That something in me goes still near the mouths of deep things.

Silence. Several of them look toward the Examiner, as if hoping she will weigh in. She does not.

ISMAIL VI

The well is real. What happened inside it — that belongs to the storytellers now.

II.  The Year of the Coup

NARRATOR

In 1953, the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup supported by American and British intelligence. The streets of Iranian cities were briefly convulsed. The boy was seven years old.

ISMAIL I

My father was an army officer. In the days after the coup, the streets were full of crowds — men moving fast, shouting things I did not understand. The Shah’s name. God’s name. Other names that made the adults lower their voices.

My mother was taking me to the barber. She was holding my hand very tightly — the way she held it when she was afraid, not the loose carrying hold. A stranger stopped us on the street, a man we didn’t know, and said: ‘Madam, it would be better to go home. They are dangerous today.’

She turned us around immediately. She didn’t ask who he was. We went home, and she did not explain.

ISMAIL II

I asked her about it years later. She said she barely remembered it. She said there were always crowds in those years, always something dangerous. It was not a specific memory for her — just the texture of that time.

Ismail II turns and looks at the Examiner directly.

ISMAIL II

Do you have questions?

Silence. The Examiner does not respond. He turns back.

ISMAIL III

Later, my father became commander of the Shahroud Regiment. Our life changed its shape. Teachers looked at me differently. I was the colonel’s son, which meant something I could feel but not name. Occasionally they gave me higher grades than I had earned. I accepted this without questioning it, the way children accept the weather.

ISMAIL I

A commissioned soldier drove us to school every morning. I thought this was how everyone traveled.

ISMAIL II

One day a classmate — a sharp-faced boy, thin in the way of boys who have not had quite enough to eat — said to me: ‘If your father weren’t a colonel, you would have failed your exams.’

I cursed him. He slapped me hard across the ear. The ringing lasted most of the day.

The next morning, I told our soldier what had happened. He said nothing. But on the way to school he called the boy over, very calmly, and said: ‘I heard you struck the colonel’s son.’

The boy looked at the ground. Then he looked at his shoes — worn through at the toe, repaired with different leather. He slowly removed them. He held them for a moment, as if deciding. Then he set them by the road and walked away barefoot.

Pause. Several of the men are looking at the Examiner now, almost involuntarily.

ISMAIL IV

Shame, I think. It was shame.

ISMAIL II

I was not ready to call it that.

The Examiner writes something on her paper. This is the only time she moves with intention. No one can see what she writes. She does not look up.

III.  First Loves and First Concepts

A warmer light. The men shift slightly — something unlocks.

ISMAIL I

I fell in love with every girl I saw. Not sequentially — simultaneously. It was enough to see them once across a courtyard or in the lane outside school. I would give them everything I had: my stamp collection, my foreign coins, my best marbles. I believed that love meant emptying yourself. That the offering was the point.

ISMAIL II

In high school I befriended a boy whose older brother had been to university. He came home on holidays carrying new words like contraband — neocolonialism, imperialism, bourgeois, liberation. He spoke of African leaders with the fervor of someone who had discovered religion: Kwame Nkrumah. Ahmed Sékou Touré. He told me about the murder of Patrice Lumumba as if it had happened last week, as if grief had no statute of limitations. Through him I understood that the world was not accidental — that its injustices had architects.

I began to read. I stopped giving girls my marbles.

ISMAIL III

At university I met Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Camus. They occupied my nights. I took careful notes in the margins of their books — arguments, objections, questions I thought were original and later discovered had been asked three centuries before.

I believed, with a confidence I now find touching, that philosophy would make me irresistible to women.

ISMAIL II

And did it?

ISMAIL III

The women from wealthy families were not moved by my knowledge of the categorical imperative. They preferred boys with motorcycles, or at least a reliable certainty about themselves that I was busy philosophizing away.

I learned that ideas, however beautiful, do not substitute for ease. That a man who second-guesses his own existence is not, in the end, a reliable companion for an evening.

He looks at the Examiner. Rueful.

ISMAIL III

Perhaps you would have found it charming.

The Examiner does not respond.

ISMAIL I

What did you do?

ISMAIL III

I read more Sartre. Which is, I suppose, the philosophical equivalent of giving away your marbles.

A small laugh moves through several of them — the same laugh, in six keys.

IV.  The Departure

The light shifts — less warm now, uncertain.

NARRATOR

In 1975, the Shah dissolved all political parties and ordered every Iranian citizen to join a single state party — the Rastakhiz, the Resurgence Party. He said: those who do not wish to join are free to take their passports and leave. Some took this as a threat. Some took it as an invitation. Ismail was twenty-nine years old.

ISMAIL II

I had already watched friends disappear — not after the revolution, but before it. Under the Shah. Men who wrote poems that asked the wrong questions. Men who organised, or who knew men who organised. One of my closest friends was a poet. He was arrested. He did not come back.

I want to say that clearly. Because it is easy, now, to remember only one side of what Iran was.

ISMAIL III

When the order came — join the party, or leave — I understood that it was not really a choice. It was a declaration. The Shah was saying: there is now only one way to be Iranian, and I have defined it.

I could not sign my name to that.

ISMAIL II

I left. I took a suitcase and the kind of certainty that only the young possess — the certainty that leaving is always cleaner than staying.

Later I would learn that certainty is also a kind of luggage. Heavy, and difficult to put down.

A pause. The men are still.

ISMAIL IV

I was not there for the revolution. That must be said plainly. 1979 — I watched it from outside. From a great distance, and with very complicated feelings.

I had friends who stayed. Friends who believed — genuinely, deeply believed — that what was coming would be better. That the revolution carried real justice inside it. Some of them were the most serious and principled people I have known. I do not have the right to reduce what they hoped for to a mistake.

ISMAIL III

And yet you also heard things. Over the years. From people who came out.

ISMAIL IV

I heard things. But hearing is not the same as knowing. And I had already made my exit before the story continued. What authority does an absent man have to narrate what he did not witness?

ISMAIL V

The absent man has a different kind of authority. He can say: I do not know. That is rarer than it sounds.

ISMAIL II

What I know is what I carried out with me. A poet friend who was executed under the Shah and whose name I still speak when I think no one is listening. The face of a country I left at twenty-nine and have been reconstructing from memory ever since. A reconstruction that grows less reliable each year, like a photograph left in sunlight.

He stops himself. Something about the image catches him.

ISMAIL II

I was going to say: like colleagues disappearing. But I don’t have the right to say what happened after I left. I only have the right to say what I saw before.

Silence. The Examiner has not moved. But her presence feels heavier now — as if the restraint of not judging is itself a kind of judgment.

ISMAIL VI

Exile teaches you one thing above all others: that the country you left no longer exists. Not because it changed — though it did — but because the country you carry in your memory was always partly a fiction. A place made of the age you were when you left it.

ISMAIL IV

I left at twenty-nine. So my Iran is perpetually twenty-nine years old. Full of arguments in coffee houses. Full of ideas that had not yet been tested against reality. Full of friends who were still alive.

A long pause.

ISMAIL III

Do you miss it?

ISMAIL IV

I miss something. I’m no longer certain it was a place.

V.  Doubt and Memory

The light becomes quieter — more interior.

ISMAIL IV

As I aged, I began to doubt not only the stories of my childhood, but the method of memory itself. When I recall my father’s voice, am I hearing him? Or am I hearing my own idea of his voice, refined by thirty years of telling myself what he was like?

ISMAIL V

Memory is not a photograph. It is a manuscript that is rewritten each time it is read — and each reading leaves traces that the next reader inherits. We do not access the past; we access the most recent revision.

ISMAIL III

Then what is the original?

ISMAIL V

Perhaps there is no original. Perhaps the first experience was already a kind of interpretation. A three-year-old in a bucket, in the dark, making sense of what had happened to him.

ISMAIL I

I was not making sense. I was crying.

ISMAIL V

Yes. And then the story began. And the story has been running ever since, picking up passengers.

ISMAIL IV

What disturbs me is this: if my memories are unreliable, then who made the decisions I remember making? I recall a specific morning when I chose to leave a city, to end a marriage, to begin something else. I have told myself that story so many times it feels like bedrock. But what if the decision happened differently — more accidentally, more blindly — and I built the story afterward to make it feel like choice?

He turns suddenly to the Examiner.

ISMAIL IV

You have been listening to all of this. Every version. Every contradiction. Every careful disclaimer.

Is that because you don’t know? Or because you have decided not to say?

The Examiner looks at him steadily. Nothing. He holds her gaze for a long moment. Then he looks away first.

ISMAIL VI

All decisions look like choices in retrospect. That is one of the great mercies of retrospect.

ISMAIL II

And one of its cruelties.

VI.  Letters Never Sent

A pause. Then, unprompted, the men begin to speak as if addressing someone who is not present among them. They do not look at the Examiner during this section — and yet the sense is inescapable that these letters are, in some way, addressed to her.

ISMAIL I

To whoever I become:

You will be frightened more often than you expect. This is not weakness. It is information. Learn to read it.

ISMAIL II

To whoever I was:

The revolution you are reading about is not the one that will arrive. Be prepared for the difference. Love the ideas; be suspicious of the organizations.

ISMAIL III

To my children, or my students, or both:

I taught you to question everything. I should also have taught you that some questions cannot be answered in a single life — and that this is acceptable. Begin the question anyway.

ISMAIL IV

To my father:

I spent a great deal of time trying to become unlike you. I became very like you. I am not certain this is a problem.

ISMAIL V

To no one in particular:

What I regret is not the large failures. The large failures were instructive. What I regret are the small refusals — the moment I did not say the kind thing, the letter I drafted and chose not to send. Those are the rooms in me that are still locked.

ISMAIL VI

I am running out of time to unlock them. I am making peace with this. Some rooms stay locked. The house is still standing.

Silence. They seem lighter — as if the letters have been posted, or burned.

Then Ismail V looks up at the Examiner.

ISMAIL V

We have been talking for a long time. I don’t suppose you would like to say anything. About any of it.

The Examiner regards him. Her expression does not change. She does not speak.

ISMAIL V

No. I thought not.

VII.  Confrontation of Selves

For the first time, the men turn toward one another fully. The light equalizes — all six illuminated the same. The Examiner’s light remains separate, constant.

ISMAIL II

You speak as if we are separate. But we are one man.

ISMAIL IV

Are we? I would not know you in the street. I would not trust you with anything important.

ISMAIL I

I would trust you all. You have my face.

ISMAIL III

I had your face once. I’m not sure I’d recognize it now.

ISMAIL V

What holds us together is not continuity of personality. It is something more structural. Shared debts. The same body, growing toward its own failure. The same name on official documents.

ISMAIL VI

And the stories. The well. The soldier’s son. The barefoot boy walking away. The poet whose name we still speak when we think no one is listening. We all carry those, even those of us who were not yet born when they happened.

ISMAIL II

The stories were handed to us before we could evaluate them.

ISMAIL IV

And by the time we could evaluate them, we had already been shaped by them. The shaping and the inheritance are simultaneous. There is no neutral position from which to examine what you have already become.

A beat. Then Ismail I looks at the Examiner — the uncomplicated look of a child, without strategy.

ISMAIL I

Do you know which one of us is real?

The Examiner looks at him. For just a moment — a fraction — something in her face seems to shift. But she does not speak. Ismail I nods, as if this answer makes perfect sense.

ISMAIL I

I am seven years old. I don’t know what they’re talking about. But I think you are all very tired.

Several of them look at him. Something eases.

ISMAIL VI

Yes. That is accurate.

VIII.  Final Reflection

The Narrator steps closer. The light expands slowly until all six men are equally illuminated.

NARRATOR

These six men are one life divided into equal statistical intervals — a convenient fiction imposed on something that was never even. No human life divides neatly. No average can capture a man who fell into a well at three, who heard a revolution through borrowed vocabulary, who gave away his stamp collection for love, who left a country rather than sign his name to something he could not believe in, and who has spent the decades since carrying a version of that country that grows quieter each year.

Each of these men claims to be the real Ismail. Each is right. The self is not a single, consistent entity moving forward through time. It is a negotiation — ongoing, unresolved — between the versions of oneself that have survived, the versions that were lost, and the versions that were only ever stories told about someone who may not have existed quite that way.

The woman at the desk has heard all of it. She will not deliver a verdict. The examination, it turns out, is not that kind of examination.

ISMAIL VI

When I look back, I do not see a single path. I see six strangers who shared my name, made decisions whose consequences I now carry, and who would, I think, be surprised to meet one another.

ISMAIL I

Did we survive the well because of faith, luck, or a story someone needed to tell?

ISMAIL III

Perhaps the three are the same thing. Perhaps faith is the story we tell about luck.

ISMAIL II

Perhaps luck is what happens when story and circumstance coincide.

ISMAIL V

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The child came up out of the dark in a bucket, into his mother’s arms. Whatever the reason — he arrived. And then the story began. And the story has made of him what it could.

ISMAIL IV

Which is all any of us can ask.

The six men look at one another — not with recognition exactly, but with the acknowledgment of people who have, after long argument, arrived at a shared silence.

ISMAIL I

I remember the bucket. The way it swayed. The smell of the rope — wet, and earthy, like something pulled from the ground.

I was not afraid.

I was waiting to see what would happen next.

The lights fade slowly on the six men — not to blackout, but to deep dusk, leaving silhouettes.

The Examiner’s light remains a moment longer. She gathers her papers with quiet deliberation. She rises. She walks off — not toward the audience, not toward the men, but through a door that may or may not exist in the dark.

Her light goes out.

Blackout.

End of Play

“In the end, we are not the events that happened to us,

but the narratives we choose to believe —

and the narratives we are not yet brave enough to revise.”