Chapter 3: For Bahram Beyzai

Growing up, your name was always present, quietly circulating in family conversations always followed by the word director. It was only during the first year of high school  that I discovered you were also a writer, an extraordinary one. I began reading your plays. The first was Toomare Sheikhe Sharzin [طومار شیخ شرزین], then many others, until I reached Pardeh Khaneh [‍پرده خانه], the one that stayed with me.

Since I was sixteen, I have celebrated your birthday every year. Perhaps because I have always been good with dates. Perhaps because your birthday falls the day after mine. Or perhaps because you shared it with my beloved grandmother. For thirteen years, I marked that day by reminding myself how exceptional you were and how unfortunate I was never to have met you in person.

This year, on your birthday, while I was watching one of your interviews, I asked myself why does life feel this hard? Why is goodness so rare? What is the point of all this effort? The next day, I heard the news. It took me almost two weeks to write anything at all. And even now, words feel inadequate. But silence feels worse.

You gave so much to our culture, to the honest image of our people and our lives, at a time when that image was being erased or distorted. What has always astonished me most in your work is hope.  “Beyond the walls, there is always a path, even if it is night.”  This is how Pardeh Khaneh ends. I still don’t understand it. I may never understand how you held onto light when everything around was pitch dark. These are the final words of Golrokh Kamali in Sagkoshi:  “Yes, it takes time but it gets better.”

Through all these years, your words endured, stronger than fear, just like your resistance. This is written in honour of a life devoted to something pure and necessary.

And yet, there is an irony I cannot ignore. You were my hero, while much of your life’s work was devoted to warning us against waiting for heroes. You taught us not to pray for someone to arrive and rescue us, not to surrender responsibility to a single figure. This refusal of hero-worship runs through your work, most clearly in Arash. And I agree with you. No one is coming to save us. No one is assigned that role. 

So let me put it this way; I believe you were the  bearer of light. A messenger who did everything he could to remind us that life is a struggle, and that the work of resistance belongs to all of us. I want to believe that Iranians have received this message; not waiting for a hero, but learning, slowly and imperfectly, to move toward the light themselves.