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:
1953 was the year of the coup. The government of Prime Minister Dr. Mossadegh was overthrown in an operation supported by American and British intelligence services. For a brief moment, the streets of Iranian cities trembled with uncertainty. The boy was seven years old.

Ismail I:
My father was an army officer. In the days after the coup—the one they said would bring the Shah back—the streets were full of noise and movement. Open army trucks rolled through the avenues, draped with velvet ribbons. Men stood in the back—bearded, agitated—chanting slogans, holding framed portraits of the Shah and waving flags.

They shouted things I didn’t understand.
“Death to Mossadegh.”
“Death to the Tudeh.”

Some people laughed as the trucks passed. Others simply stared, expressionless, as if watching something distant, something that did not quite belong to them.

My mother took my hand that day—tightly, more tightly than usual. She said we were going to the barbershop. But she was afraid. I could feel it in the way she held me, as if letting go even for a second would lose something irretrievable.

A man we didn’t know stopped us on the street. He spoke quietly, but with urgency:
“Madam, you’d better go home. The mobs are dangerous today.”

My mother didn’t ask who he was. She didn’t hesitate. She turned around immediately and took me home.

When we arrived, my father was sitting by the radio.

Ismail II:
Years later, I asked my mother about that day. She said she didn’t remember it clearly. She said that in those years everything was tense, everything uncertain. Danger was constant—like weather. That day, she told me, was no different from any other.

(He turns to the interrogator, searching her face.)

Do you have any questions?

(Silence. The interrogator does not respond. Ismail II turns away, unsettled.)

Ismail III:
Later, my father became the commander of the Shahroud Regiment. Our lives changed shape.

At school, the teachers began to look at me differently. I was the son of a colonel. I could feel it in the pauses, in the way my name was spoken, in the small hesitations that surrounded me. Sometimes my grades were higher than they should have been. I never questioned it. To a child, such things feel as natural as rain or wind—events without explanation.

Ismail I:
A conscript soldier was assigned to our household. Every morning, he took me to school—alongside the governor’s son. I thought this was perfectly normal. I never asked why.

Ismail II:
One day, a classmate—a thin boy with large, restless eyes, the kind you see in children who always seem to be bracing for something—said to me:
“If your father weren’t a colonel, you would have failed.”

I lost my temper. I insulted him.
He struck me—hard—across the ear.

All that day, my ears rang.

The next morning, I told our soldier guard what had happened. He listened without interrupting. Said nothing.

On the way to school, he called the boy over. Quietly. Almost gently.
“I heard you hit the colonel’s son.”

The boy lowered his head. Then he looked at his shoes—worn at the toes, patched with mismatched leather. Slowly, almost ceremonially, he slipped them off.

For a moment, he stood there, holding them in his hands, as if deciding something. Then he placed them by the side of the road… and began to walk barefoot.

The soldier watched him in silence.

(Pause. Several of the Ismails glance, almost involuntarily, toward the interrogator.)

Ismail IV:
I think… that was the moment.
It was unbearable. I still cannot forget it.

Ismail II:
I still don’t understand it.

(The interrogator makes a small mark on her paper—the first deliberate movement she has made. No one can see what she has written. She does not look up.)

III.  First Loves and First Concepts

The lighting softens into warmth. The Ismails shift slightly—as if something long sealed has found a key.

Ismail I:
I fell in love with every girl I saw. Not one by one—but all at once, together, without distinction. It was enough to glimpse someone in the schoolyard, or passing through an alley, and I would fall in love completely—with my whole being.

I wanted to give them everything I had.
My stamp album.
My collection of foreign coins.
My most beautiful colored marbles.

For me, love meant surrender. To love was to give everything away. That was its entire meaning.

Ismail II:
In high school, I became friends with a boy whose older brother was a university student. When he came home on holidays, he brought with him words we had never heard before—strange, heavy words. Words like “counterinsurgency.”

We looked them up in the dictionary, but he insisted on explaining them differently—claiming, for example, that in American slavery, runaway slaves were labeled as “counterinsurgents.” It didn’t quite make sense, but we believed him. Or perhaps we wanted to believe him.

There were other words—imperialism, colonialism—but let’s pass over them and arrive at what mattered: the feeling.

He spoke with the fervor of someone who had just discovered a new faith. He told us about African revolutionary leaders—Nkrumah, Sékou Touré—as if they were living prophets. He spoke of Patrice Lumumba’s speech before the Belgian king with a kind of trembling admiration, and of his betrayal and assassination as if it had happened only yesterday—his grief untouched by time.

Through him, I learned something decisive:
that the world is not accidental.
That injustice is not random.
That somewhere, there are architects—designers—who shape it.

That is when I began to read political books.

After that… I stopped giving my marbles to girls.

Ismail III:
At university, I encountered Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Camus. Their books filled my nights.

In the margins, I wrote constantly—my reflections, my objections, my questions. I believed, with a kind of quiet arrogance, that I was thinking ahead of my time… that I was discovering something new.

Later, I understood that I was only retracing paths already walked. Every question I had—someone, somewhere, had already posed it, already struggled with it, already offered an answer.

Still, I believed something else—something perhaps even more naïve.

I believed I could influence the girls at the university.

Ismail II:
Did you?

Ismail III:
No.

They were mostly from wealthy families—the daughter of a court minister, the daughter of a general, even the daughter of a Tudeh Party leader, who arrived at campus with her small, well-groomed dog.

They were not impressed by my reflections on existence, or my analyses of power and society. Their attention belonged elsewhere—to boys who arrived on motorcycles, or in fast cars, or who simply carried themselves with the effortless confidence of belonging.

I thought, foolishly, that philosophy could compete with that. That one could confront wealth with ideas—oppose privilege with the “philosophy of the proletariat.”

I was wrong.

I learned that even the most intricate and beautiful ideas cannot rival money. To them, a young man questioning the meaning of existence was not profound—it was impractical. Even strange. He was of no use at parties, no companion for dances.

(He looks toward the interrogator, searching.)

Ismail III (to the interrogator):
Tell me… is a philosopher agreeable to you?

(The interrogator does not respond.)

Ismail I:
So what did you do?

Ismail III:
I buried myself in books. I read Sartre obsessively.

Perhaps that, too, was a form of surrender—another version of giving away my marbles and my stamps… only this time, to ideas instead of girls.

(Several of the Ismails smile—similar, almost indistinguishable smiles.)

Years later, in America, I attended a party. One of those girls was there—with her wealthy husband.

When she introduced me to her friends, she laughed and said:
“Back then, he was always talking about Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidegger… we never really understood what he meant.”

IV.  The Departure to Exile

The lighting shifts. The warmth recedes. The atmosphere grows uncertain, the light thinner, less forgiving.

Narrator:
In 1972, the Shah dissolved the remaining political pluralism and announced the creation of a single, state-run party: Rastakhiz. Every Iranian citizen was instructed to join. Those who refused were told they were free to leave the country.

Some understood this as a threat.
Others interpreted it as a form of political modernization—an attempt, they said, to streamline governance and institutionalize controlled dissent.

Ismail II:
In those years, I saw my friends disappear—not after the 1979 revolution, but before it. Under the Shah.

Students who wrote poems on walls.
Students who asked the wrong questions in classrooms.

Those who organized—or were suspected of knowing those who organized—were summoned, interrogated, accused in the language of “security” and “order.”

One of my closest friends was a poet. He was arrested, tried… and executed. No charges were ever made clear.

I want to say this plainly. Because it is easy now to forget. Or to allow these processes to be covered over, absorbed into nostalgia.

(A brief pause.)

There was a time I believed that knowing philosophy—that knowing the names of philosophers—would change how the world responded to me. That it might even… influence the girls at the university.

(A faint, almost ironic smile.)

Ismail III:
When they ordered us to join the party—or leave…
when they spoke of stamping our identification cards as proof of participation in “elections”…

we understood that something fundamental had shifted.

This was no longer even the appearance of choice.
It was a declaration.

The Shah was saying:
There is now only one way to be Iranian.
And it is the way I define.

I could not accept that stamp. Not on my identity. Not on my life.

Ismail II:
That was when I packed my suitcase and left. I exiled myself.

There is a kind of certainty that belongs only to the young—a conviction that departure is always cleaner than compromise, that leaving humiliation behind is better than carrying it.

Later, I realized that certainty itself was a kind of suitcase.
Heavy. Difficult to put down. Impossible to abandon.

Pause. The Ismails fall still, as if suspended between departure and memory.

Ismail IV:
I was not in Iran during the 1979 revolution. I must say this plainly.

I watched it from a distance—geographical, emotional, intellectual. And my feelings were… complicated.

I had friends who remained. Friends who believed—deeply, sincerely—that the revolution would bring justice. That it would open a new horizon. Some of them were among the most principled people I knew.

But they did not see the larger forces at play. They imagined that Iran might emerge as something more advanced than Switzerland, or Scandinavia. They did not yet understand that democracy is not a declaration—it is an architecture. It requires institutions: parties, elections, habits of participation. These are built slowly. Learned over time.

They did not consider how earlier historical ruptures had already weakened those foundations.

Ismail VI:
One must go further back.

After the First World War, amid the collapse of imperial orders and the Bolshevik Revolution, external powers reshaped Iran’s trajectory. British strategic calculations—financial exhaustion, oil concessions, regional security—led to interventions that disrupted the fragile constitutional order.

Military forces were reorganized, centralized. Local institutions weakened. Opportunities for gradual democratic development were curtailed.

Some officers resisted. Some despaired. Some… did not survive their despair.

Ismail V:
And yet, history is never so simple.

You place power in the hands of a man shaped by force—what do you expect? Accumulation, control, domination. Land was seized, wealth concentrated. By the time he was forced to leave, he had become one of the largest landholders in the region.

Ismail IV:

I do not wish to judge my friends.

I have no right to reduce their hopes to error.

Ismail III:
And yet, over the years, you must have heard things… from those who left.

Ismail IV:
I heard many things. But hearing is not the same as witnessing. And many voices speak from positions shaped by their own interests, their own alignments.

I left before the story unfolded. What right does absence have to narrate what it did not see?

Ismail V:
Absence has its own kind of authority.

It can say: I do not know.

Very few are willing to say that.

Ismail III:
What I know is this:

I remember a friend—a poet—executed under the Shah.
I speak his name, and it feels as though no one hears it.

I remember the country I left at twenty-nine.
I have been reconstructing it ever since—out of fragments, impressions, memory.

But each year, the reconstruction becomes less reliable.
Like a photograph left too long in the sun… fading, losing its edges.

(He stops. The image overwhelms him.)

Ismail II:
I want to speak of disappearances. Of classmates who vanished.

But I cannot speak of what happened after I left.
I only have the right to testify to what I saw with my own eyes.

Silence. The interrogator remains still. Yet the stillness grows heavier—as if withholding judgment has itself become a form of judgment.

Ismail VI:
Exile teaches one lesson above all:

The country you left no longer exists.

Not only because it has changed—though it has.
But because the country you remember was always, in part, a construction.

A place shaped by memory—fixed at the age at which you departed.

Ismail IV:
I left Iran at twenty-nine.

So my Iran is always twenty-nine.
Full of arguments in cafés.
Full of ideas not yet tested by reality.
Full of friends who are still alive.

A long pause.

Ismail III:
Do you miss it?

Ismail IV:
I miss… something I am no longer certain ever existed.

V.  Doubt and Memories

The lighting softens further—quieter now, more interior, as if the scene has turned inward upon itself.

Ismail IV:
As I grow older, I find myself doubting not only the stories of my childhood… but the very act of remembering.

When I hear my father’s voice—
is it truly his voice?

Or is it my own voice, shaped over decades, speaking through him?
A voice I have reconstructed, again and again, until it feels authentic?

Have I been remembering him…
or rewriting him?

Ismail V:
Memory is not a photograph.

It is closer to a handwritten manuscript—one that is revised each time it is read. Every reading leaves a trace. Every reader alters the text, however slightly.

The next reader encounters these traces… but does not recognize them as alterations. He assumes this is how the text was always written.

We have no direct access to the past.
What we remember is only the latest edition of that manuscript.

Ismail III:
Then there is no way to know the real story?

Ismail V:
Perhaps there is no single “real” story.

I once had a friend who told me:
“I have lied all my life—and now those lies have become my memories.”

Even the first experience is uncertain. What does a child truly understand? Imagine a three-year-old falling into a well—darkness, confusion, fear.

What remains of that moment?
Not a narrative. Not a fact.

Only a sensation. A blur.
Something like the beginning of a story… before language.

Ismail I:
I didn’t understand anything.
I was just crying.

Ismail V:
Exactly.

And that is where the story begins.

From there, it gathers everything—every event, every interpretation—like a train that never stops, taking on passengers at every station, never discarding any of them.

Ismail IV:
What unsettles me is this:

If my memories are unreliable…
then who made the decisions I remember making?

I recall a morning when I decided to leave Iran.
Another day, when I chose to end my marriage and begin again.

I have told myself these stories as if they were decisive moments—as if I stood before a door and consciously chose the key.

But what if… those decisions were never truly mine?

What if they emerged from chance, from pressure, from forces I did not understand?
And only later did I construct the story of “choice”… to give myself coherence?

(He turns abruptly toward the interrogator, searching, almost accusing.)

Ismail IV:
You sit there, listening to all of this—these contradictions, these revisions…

“It wasn’t me.”
“It was my fault.”
“It was inevitable.”

(A beat.)

Why are you silent?

Is it because you don’t know what to say—
or because you decided, from the beginning, to say nothing?

(The interrogator looks at him—expressionless. No reaction.)

(A long pause. Ismail IV holds the gaze, then slowly looks away.)

Ismail VI:
When we look back, every decision appears as our own.

That is one of the quiet comforts of hindsight.

Ismail II:
No.

It is one of its most unbearable illusions.

VI.  Letters Never Sent

After a long silence, without preamble, the Ismails begin to speak—as if addressing someone absent. They do not look at the interrogator. And yet, it is impossible to escape the sense that these letters are, in some way, meant for her.

Ismail I:
To whoever I will become:
You will be more afraid than you expect. This is not weakness. It is the cost of confronting complexity. Learn to face it.

Ismail II:
To whoever I once was:
The revolution you imagine will not arrive carrying only justice. It will demand a price. Hold on to your ideas—but remember: no treasure comes without suffering.

Ismail III:
To my children—or my students—or perhaps both:
I taught you to question everything. I should have also taught you that some questions cannot be answered within a lifetime… and that this, too, is acceptable. Ask them anyway.

Ismail IV:
To my father:
I spent years trying not to become you. Yet I find myself growing into your shape. I am no longer certain that this is a failure.

Ismail V:
To no one in particular:
What I regret is not my great failures. Those taught me something.

What I regret are the smaller omissions—the kindness I withheld, the words I never spoke, the letters I wrote and never sent.

They remain—sealed compartments in the mind.

Ismail VI:
There is no time left to open them all.

I am learning to accept that. The safes remain locked… and yet, the house still stands.

Silence settles over the scene. The Ismails seem lighter—as if the letters have been sent, or perhaps burned.

Then Ismail V turns toward the interrogator.

Ismail V:
We have been speaking for a long time.

I imagine you have nothing to say.

The interrogator looks at him. Her expression does not change. She remains silent.

Ismail V:
No… I didn’t think so.

VII.  Confrontation of Selves

For the first time, the Ismails turn fully toward one another. The lighting equalizes—each of them illuminated with the same intensity. The interrogator remains in cold, fixed light.

Ismail II:
We speak as if we are separate.

But are we not all the same person—divided across time?

Ismail IV:
The same person?

If I passed you on a street, I would not recognize you. I would not trust you.

Ismail I:
I trust all of you.

I love you—because I see myself in you.

Ismail III:
I was once like you.

Now I am not sure any resemblance remains.

Ismail V:
What binds us is not a stable personality.

It is something more constructed—more artificial.

Our names, recorded in official documents.
Our debts.
The persistence of the body—carrying its wounds, its fatigue—moving forward, even as something unseen follows behind it.

Ismail VI:
And the stories.

The story of the well.
The story of the conscript—and the boy who walked away barefoot.
The story of the poet who was executed—whose name we still repeat, even as we suspect no one is listening.

The story of suffering we inherited… even from before we were born.

We carry these stories.
Even when we do not remember them.

Ismail II:
Stories told to us before we could judge them.

Like the story of Reza Shah— tyrant, criminal, cruel, savior, builder,—told in tones that demanded belief.

Ismail IV:
By the time we were capable of questioning those narratives, they had already shaped us.

They became filters—through which we perceived everything else.

There was no neutral ground from which to evaluate them.

Formation and conditioning happened at the same time.

So it is no surprise that, even under pressure, some still cried out:
“Reza Shah—may your soul rest in peace.”

A brief pause.

Ismail I looks toward the interrogator—simply, without calculation.

Ismail I:
Do you know which one of us is the real Ismail?

The interrogator looks at him. For a brief moment, something in her expression shifts—almost imperceptibly. But she says nothing.

Ismail I nods, as if her silence were a complete answer.

Ismail I:
I am seven. I don’t understand what they are saying.

But I think… you are all very tired.

Several of the Ismails turn toward him. Something in them softens—unspoken, but real.

Ismail VI:
Yes.

We are all very tired.

VIII.  Final Reflection

The Narrator steps forward. The light expands evenly, but remains soft—edges blurred, as if nothing is fully defined.

NARRATOR:
These six men are one life—
or perhaps only six ways of telling it.

We divide a life to understand it.
We name its phases, isolate its decisions, reconstruct its meaning.

But the divisions do not belong to the life itself.
They belong to us.

Each of these men claims to be the real Ismail.
Each is convincing.
None is complete.

The woman at the desk has listened.
She offers no conclusion—because none has been asked of her that can be given.

ISMAIL VI:
When I look back, I do not see a single path.

I see possibilities—some lived, some imagined, some remembered differently each time I return to them.

ISMAIL III:
Perhaps memory is not a record…
but a conversation we continue to have with ourselves.

ISMAIL II:
And perhaps the past does not change—
only our position within it.

ISMAIL V:
Or perhaps both are true.

(A pause—not heavy, but open.)

ISMAIL I:
I remember the well.

But sometimes I think…
I am still there.

(A subtle shift in light—uncertain, almost imperceptible.)

ISMAIL IV:
And sometimes I think we never left.

That everything that followed…
was only another way of telling that moment.

ISMAIL VI:
Or another way of leaving it.

(Silence.)

ISMAIL I:
I was waiting to see what would happen next.

(He looks outward—not at the interrogator, not at the others, but somewhere beyond.)

ISMAIL I (quietly):
Maybe we still are.

The six men do not look at one another this time. They remain facing slightly different directions.

The interrogator gathers her papers. She pauses—as if she might speak.

She does not.

She exits.

The light does not fully fade. It lingers in a dim, unresolved dusk.

No 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.”