TABLE OF REFORMS
by FERESHTEH AHMADI, TRANS. BY SIAVASH SAADLOU
The man who called himself Adeleh-Z counted the squares and quickly drew a line. The notebooks, made with graph paper, had made his work easier. He no longer needed a ruler or a protractor to draw tables. He just had to count the squares.
Over the past three months, he had added several new columns to the table. Sometimes, when he flipped through his notebooks and saw the results of his efforts, he felt a sense of satisfaction. Orderliness, discipline, and neat handwriting were very important. If this work was to serve as a model for future generations, he couldn’t just disregard such principles. They were exactly what demarcated the boundaries.
He had even bought some colorful rollerball pens.
He paid great attention to recording dates accurately because he had realized that the relative value of everything—goods and actions—could be inferred from the number of years that had elapsed from their arrival on the scene; history was the key to solving potential problems. For instance, just as children today don’t know what floppy disks or diskettes were, future generations might have no idea about CDs.
Perhaps he’d decide to type up his tables eventually, but for now, he preferred to write them out by hand, so that they reflected his taste and meticulousness. Sometimes he even laughed at himself for being so confident that future generations would not only see these notebooks but also comment on them. Perhaps they would base their judgments on that troublesome last column, or even use it as a Criterion for Action.
Whenever the question of the Criterion for Action arose, he would squint at the table’s last column with skepticism. Foolishly, he had at first wanted to label it something like “Punishment Proportional to Action.” That would have been reckless. Proportionality was one of those vague and undefined concepts, and that was exactly how he wanted it. Interpreting the proportionality of punishment to action could be left to time, the enforcer, and the offender. Leaving things undefined gave him more flexibility and allowed him to avoid having to explain himself.
With beautiful Nasta’liq handwriting, he wrote the column headers: Offender’s Name, Offense, Possible Practical Measures, Currently Impractical Measures, Address, Phone Number, and yes—this new column. He added his name, Adeleh-Z, to the top in red. His previous notebooks didn’t have a specific category, but now he had confidently chosen this one: Proportional to the Offender’s Action.
Since beginning a little over a year ago, his tabulations had grown more refined and efficient. Of course, “efficient” was one of those words he was sensitive about. From the beginning, he had made a few promises to himself. One of these was that the success or failure of his ideas should neither deter him from soldiering on nor lead to disappointment. For instance, his phone calls reporting people’s mistakes often yielded unclear or indefinite results. He persisted nevertheless, becoming more effective bit by bit.
At first, boycotting a few stores had sufficed. He had blacklisted the neighborhood’s grocery store for keeping expired milk in the fridge. Later, he boycotted the local fruit shop for selling damaged and soaked cardboard boxes for 500 tomans, while his research showed that a solid, new box cost only 400. These boycotts had made his daily shopping more laborious, as he now had to travel farther to buy from stores he hadn’t blacklisted. But such difficulties paled in comparison to the suffering humans had endured in the long history of the struggle for justice.
Early on, he avoided using notebooks, records, or tables, but after thinking long and hard about the scope of his work, he began documenting his actions. It happened like this: One day, while buying some pens, his eyes fell on some CDs, labeled FREE, stacked on the seller’s counter. He placed one next to his purchases, only for the boy at the counter to add 700 tomans to his total.
“They used to be free, but not anymore,” the seller explained.
He wanted to put the CD back, but then he noticed the distributor’s phone number printed on the cover. He added the CD and the store’s business card to his shopping bag, along with a thick notebook he suddenly realized he needed for a project that had just sparked in his mind. That day, he called the distribution center and reported that a store at a certain address was selling their promotional CDs for a certain price. The woman on the phone thanked him and promised to follow up.
From that day on, he wrote in his dedicated notebook, his method of documentation becoming ever more organized and polished. On that first day, his table only had columns for names, addresses, and phone numbers. Later he added more columns, including one labeled Actions Taken. For a while, his work consisted of harmless, cautious measures such as making phone calls, reporting, and boycotting stores. The problem with boycotts, though, was that he couldn’t tell whether his actions had any impact on, say, the sale of the supposedly free CDs. He also, for some reason, didn’t want to revisit those stores. He feared that something in his behavior would reveal that he had acted against them.
The column labeled “Currently Impractical Measures” was the most fascinating and entertaining of all. This column seemed the most useful for posterity—posterity. Early on, even in his own mind, he hesitated to use this word openly. But by now, he had abandoned such modesty, confident that future generations would continue his work. These yet-to-be-born people were his primary audience. Excited, he imagined them swaddled in white hospital blankets or squirming in their mothers’ wombs. Unconsciously, he would clench his fists in delight. These were the people he intended to reach, as if he were setting messages adrift in glass bottles: his “little people.” Amidst the vicissitudes of life, the sneers and jeers of those around him, he found solace in the thought of these tiny, future people.
He once plucked up the courage to discuss his work with a coworker. He tucked his notebook under his arm, so it would be ready to show if the coworker responded positively. But the ginger-haired man’s snicker made him quietly slide the notebook back into his desk drawer. He realized he couldn’t expect sympathy from his those around him, absorbed as they were in their personal and selfish concerns. It was then that he placed his hope for appreciation entirely on those who would come much later—people who, according to scientists, would be smarter and more acutely sensitive to the sting of these seemingly insignificant injustices.
After that, his confidence grew exponentially. He even allowed himself to write memorable phrases in red pen at the top of each page in his notebook. On one page, he had written: Justice depends on all of us doing our small part.
That ginger-haired man had gotten one thing right. He’d said, “The TV shows starving African children from morning to night while advertising foreign brands. Every day, we witness some people growing poorer and others getting richer. It’s as clear as day that as long as the world exists, some people will have to toil so that a few can live in luxury. These small, insignificant things you’re going on about won’t do anything to change the world.”
But even these words didn’t dissuade him. On the contrary, they made him even more determined, convincing him that he needed to focus even more on immediate, local issues instead of taking a global view. To avoid being distracted by events in distant corners of the world, he began to pay less attention to the news. As long as his neighbor littered on the staircase, the grocery store overcharged, his coworker acted hypocritically, and the secretary’s personal effects across were strewn across his desk, there was no point in waiting for justice on a larger scale. Things wouldn’t get better until individuals addressed themselves to smaller issues like these.
As a good citizen, as a decent human being, he believed it was everyone’s duty to take note of wrongs and try to right them, and to spread awareness. He believed that people needed to be stopped from normalizing minor wrongdoings—that the dulled sensitivities of individuals had to be awakened. Social mores had to be revived. He wanted the best but knew all too well that he had to start small.
Whenever he tried to generalize his thoughts, he lost track of his argument and started rambling. Thinking of “all the people” made him feel flustered. In his fifty-some years of life, he had grown daily more suspicious of that word: people. Everyone said, “People have no sense of fairness,” or “People are losing their faith,” but nobody ever included themselves in the people. When his elderly neighbor remarked, “People are idiots—they throw cigarette butts in the stairwell,” everyone nodded in agreement, as if the word “people” referred to everyone but them.
After having such scattered thoughts, he tried to get himself back on track. He’d make a phone call or search for an organization by name, attempting to expose those that duped consumers by making them believe they had earned their official certifications. These activities brought him immense joy and satisfaction. He’d draft his communiqués and send them to various addresses using the email handle “Adeleh-Z.”
He had come across the name Adeleh-Z by chance during one of his online adventures. At first, it was just the name that caught his eye, but then he considered that if he had married and had a daughter, he’d have named her Adeleh, though without the Z. Later, he saw a picture of the person behind the name—a vivacious girl, with a beautiful face, of child-bearing age. Something in her distant gaze suggested she had endured immense suffering. In addition to being beautiful, a face had to have pain and empathy written all over it. Over time, Adeleh-Z became his pseudonym, appearing in some of his letters. He didn’t care whether the name was feminine or masculine; no one would ever discover his real identity anyway.
Still, these activities didn’t preoccupy him too much. What truly brought him peace was action. Whenever he felt useless or lost, he returned to his immediate surroundings. He called it it “real space,” an area he had measured at 2,335 steps by 3,422 steps on a snowy day when, umbrella in hand, he walked its perimeter in the park. He began by noticing his footprints on the park’s southern edge, which sparked the idea of marking his entire neighborhood. He counted his steps and recorded them in his notebook, writing: This is the area where I’m trying to expose every single social issue, one by one, line by line, point by point. A problem, once recognized, is already half solved.
In the park, if someone littered in front of him, he would calmly pick it up and toss it into the trash without confronting them. This way, he would avoid unnecessary clashes while leaving a lasting impression. It also put him in a good mood for some time. But in the unruly realm of the internet, where there was no face-to-face interaction, he couldn’t gauge how effective his actions might have been. Not that he sought immediate results—never. He knew the efficacy of his work shouldn’t be confined to the present. Building a better world required a great deal of patience and perseverance.
Most of the time, he didn’t know exactly what to write in the column labeled Punishment Proportional to the Offender’s Action. He wasn’t sure how much detail to provide or how much to conceal. The first time he made a phone call with a fake voice and lied about his identity in order to expose someone, he had struggled to find the words to justify his actions. If he were to fully document such acts, they might serve as a bad example for future generations. But he never second-guessed himself or the righteousness of his acts.
One of his ambitious coworkers at the office would do anything to further his career. During the noontime prayer, he would roll up his sleeves and head to the prayer room before everyone else, so the company’s CEO would notice him. One day, after this coworker rolled up his sleeves and left, Adeleh-Z opened his desk drawer to grab a leave request form. What he saw unnerved him: The man had placed his dirty socks atop the Quran. As a wave of revulsion washed over him, he used a pen to push the socks aside.
The next day, he called the office from a public phone and asked to speak with the coworker. In a nasal, fabricated voice, he told the secretary: This man has proposed to my daughter, and I’d like to inquire if he’s a good manager.
The secretary replied, First of all, he’s not a manager, and secondly, he’s already married.
He knew the news would explode like a bomb as soon as everyone learned of his coworker’s inappropriate behavior. He refrained from writing the details in his notebook, satisfied that someone was finally getting their just deserts. Justice didn’t always take a direct path. Wasn’t it often said that if someone sinned for twenty years in this world, they would burn for eternity in the next? And wasn’t it true that if parents neglected their responsibilities in raising their child, the innocent would suffer for the mistakes of the parents? So, he reasoned, the usual and direct paths needed to be dispensed with. In noting this, he relied, once again, on the same vague phrase: Proportional to the offender’s action.
Because the concept of proportionality was undefined, its future interpretation was also unclear, as were the actions his followers might take. Therefore, he concluded, the choice must be left to the individuals themselves. This was a new thought.
After that, he lied a few more times. Once, he called a woman to inform her that her husband was cheating on her. Another time, he wrote a letter to a school, accusing a PE teacher who had called his nephew a “retard” of being a pedophile. In every case, whenever he felt he was going too far, he would calmly steer himself back to his own solid and secure path. He knew he needed to remain vigilant, and he took it upon himself to be his own most ruthless critic.
He admitted to himself that he sometimes went overboard. He would feel he had crossed a line. Incomplete entries began to appear in his notebook: the offender’s name, phone number, and address remained in the table, but the “punishment” section was left blank. The nature of the punishment was never specified. In these instances, he would reprimand himself and, write Stay in Your Lane in red pen at the top of the page. He would console himself with the thought of another column, for which he had left ample space: Currently Impossible Actions. Filling it allowed his imagination to take flight. That’s what the column was for in the first place.
For example, he had thought the best punishment for the fruit vendor who overpriced his cardboard boxes would be to hire a group of masked individuals to storm his shop, scatter all the fruit, and steal the boxes. Perhaps the best way to handle the bank clerk who served his buddies out of turn would be for someone to reach through the half-circle opening in the teller window, grab the clerk by the collar, and slam his head into the glass until blood smeared the surface, while everyone around him laughed. The best punishment for the mail carrier who refused to climb four flights of stairs to deliver his package, he imagined, would be to steal his motorcycle. Someone could lock the stairwell door behind him, take the motorcycle, and toss the mail into the air. The motorcycle could be left where the mail carrier could find it. It would be hilarious.
Aside from taking the edge off his anger, imagining such impossible or improbable actions also entertained him. He wrote this section in green ink, emphasizing that it was mostly for amusement and that future generations shouldn’t take it seriously, lest they raise sons who would think slamming a bank clerk’s head into the glass was justifiable. Once he wrote: “I secretly got into the back of a white-and-green police car. When the reckless officer stopped to buy his son a juice, I jumped into the driver’s seat and drove off. I kept an eye on his sidearm, but I knew as long as his son was sitting beside me, I was safe. I told the boy not to be afraid—this was all just a game. Then I crashed the car into the wall of the police station and got out. The boy looked at me, stunned. I told him not to move until his father came for him.”
He wrote this after observing parents of schoolchildren in his neighborhood calmly parking in the road to drop off and pick up their kids. One day, he saw a police officer with a radio walking through the alley and felt relieved that someone was finally there to bring order and address the chaos. But then, he saw the same officer holding a boy’s hand and running toward his patrol car, which was illegally parked in the road along with all the others. The next day, he waited outside the school, read the officer’s name from the badge on his chest, and made a phone call. He was passed from one department to another until a woman’s recorded voice finally instructed him to file his complaint. He provided the officer’s name and car number, though his mind continued to race with ideas about other actions he could take.
He pulled a kitchen stool onto his balcony and from there he watched as, in the days that followed, the officer with his holstered weapon and radio went dashing through the alley, the flashing lights of his car left on.
One day, as the red-and-blue lights of the police car spun endlessly, an ambulance arrived with sirens blaring. Paramedics rushed into the alley. A firefighter stepped out from large red truck. A garbage truck was stopped nearby, its radio playing “Für Elise” as its driver collected blue bags of recyclables. The alley filled with lights and sirens, and uniformed men and women ran past. One of them was leading a child by the hand.
Startled, he dragged the stool back into the house and closed the balcony door as “Für Elise” continued to echo in his ears: Di-ri, di-ri, di-ri-ri-ri, di-ri-ri-ri…
After that, he removed the school alley from his designated area of concern. He rounded the dimensions of his territory to 1,000 by 1,000 steps—the smaller, the better. One Friday, he walked them all, to define the perimeter of his influence. He rolled up his notebook and slipped it into his coat pocket to remind himself of his goals, and to avoid the excesses of the “Currently Impossible Actions” column.
Still, he keyed the car door of his upstairs neighbor, who had parked in front of the water meter. At the building’s security desk, he regretted his action and scratched the red paint off the key with his fingernail. The security guard greeted him warmly, but he only nodded in return.
The guard was an olive-skinned, curly-haired young man who had clearly taken the position of someone more deserving. Security jobs were for retired old men or weary workers, not a lively twenty-year-old. Later, Adeleh-Z called the security desk from a public phone and said that he intended to report him to the police for ogling women. The guard’s voice trembled as he stammered and begged not to lose his job. He said the women themselves started conversations with him. Adeleh-Z laughed, then shouted, I’ll hand you over to the police to have your ass kicked before hanging up the phone.
Having lost count of his steps, he returned to the complex and walked briskly past the security booth. Restarting from the entrance to his building, he counted: 357 steps to the booth. He didn’t go further—this much was enough. He circled back through the alley behind his building, counted 433 steps, and redefined his territory. Taking the rolled-up notebook from his coat pocket, he wrote: Focus more on finer details.
He wandered through the complex inspecting the trash bins, the garden plots, and the porch lights that remained dimly lit in the daylight, casting a pale-yellow glow. He wanted to have a rough estimate of how much work it would take to organize his new territory. A cat whose tail had been cut off darted from beneath a car and ran off toward the bins. The complex was overrun with these cats, dirty and scruffy, perhaps because they scavenged for food in the trash. He debated whether issues related to the cats should also fall under his purview.
If the hallway lights were put on timers, that would be better. He needed to propose this idea to the building’s management board. He noted this in his notebook. Some children had left their soccer goals in the driveway where cars passed. After moving the goals aside, he headed into his apartment.
He wrote several letters to the management board, addressing hallway lighting, the provision of feeding stations for the cats, the recruitment of older men for security and gardening jobs, and the assignment of younger people to the tasks of cleaning the stairwells and maintaining the grounds. He sealed the letters and dropped them off at the rental office the next morning on his way to work. This small act left him feeling more positive as his day began.
He documented his completed actions thoroughly in his notebook.
He opened the bus window, and the cool morning breeze brushed his face. For the first time in a long while, he leaned back and took a nap. His workday was equally calm. The ginger-haired coworker had taken the day off, and after reviewing a few files, Adeleh-Z solved the crossword puzzle in Hamshahri. Lunch was chicken with barberry rice, and though the chicken had a strange smell, he ate it with gusto. In the afternoon, he tackled a more challenging crossword and returned home in the evening still in a good mood.
But as he passed the security booth and entered his defined territory, a bitter, oily sensation rose to his throat. He lowered his gaze as he opened the building door and bounded up the stairs two at a time. Inside, he put the kettle on. He paced the length and width of his apartment—nine steps by seventeen—while waiting for the water to boil. After a hesitation, he carefully recorded the new dimensions of his territory in his notebook. This, he thought, was a kind of lesson. Recognizing our limits when taking on important responsibilities is essential—very essential.
Feeling lighter and more at ease, he turned to the kettle, only to find it had boiled dry and was making crackling sounds. He ran it under cold water, and the kettle let out a loud huff. White residue floated to the surface. He abandoned the idea of tea, remembering the red can of soda that had been waiting for him in the fridge for ages. Standing there with the fridge door open, he took a long sip of the cool drink. Then he sat on a stool, gazing into the fridge as he drank.
He removed cans of cheese, and jars of pickles and jam, and set them on the counter. Next he removed two of the shelves and placed them on the kitchen floor. He sat down again, captivated by the fridge’s small light, the coolness and whiteness of its interior, the faint mist swirling beneath the freezer. He absentmindedly estimated the dimensions of the fridge and suddenly burst into laughter. He crumpled the soda can and tossed it in the trash.
He removed the shelves completely. He placed one foot inside the fridge, and then, holding carefully onto the upper edge, he squeezed his other foot in. He crouched, tucking his legs to his chest. He looked at the white, clean walls, inhaled the scent of frozen bread, and closed the door.
author pic here
Fereshteh Ahmadi is an Iranian novelist, short story writer, literary critic, and editor. Her debut novel, The Fairy of Forgetfulness, was published in 2009 and became a Mehregan Award finalist, and her second novel is titled Cheese Forest. Ahmadi has also published three story collections: The Sara of Everyone, Domestic Monsters, and Heatstroke, in which “Table of Reforms” appears. She has edited several anthologies of fiction, including The Book of Tehran and Iran +100.
Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, and Southeast Review, among other journals. He is the winner of the 2025 Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction, the 2024 McNally Jackson Booksellers Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation. His work has received support from Tin House, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Vermont Studio Center.
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