I wrote a short story a few weeks back about Bapu. I haven't edited it since, so sorry if there are a few grammar errors, but I wanted to share something personal. He is so loved and will be dearly missed. His life and legacy are beyond compare, and he touched many lives.
The Library Game
“Let’s play the library game.”
By now, I know that to be a sign that my grandfather has had enough of the roughhousing, the screaming, the running, the fighting, and wishes for a moment of peace only rewarded if everyone has their face muzzled in a book. My cousins and sister moan and plead, making bargains that they’ll do anything, and they mean anything, to get out of playing library game, but my grandfather won’t hear of it. You will sit and read! He says. It is good for you! He says.
But all the pleading and all the moaning is just more noise, so my grandfather sends them off. They fly in different directions, someone calls out, “You’re it!” and the library game is over before it starts.
I stay.
We sit side by side, him in his big, black office chair with a blue pillow at the base that I think is supposed to help his back pain and me in my grandmother’s office chair that is far too big for me. I sit nestled in the crease between the cushion and the back.
“You like library game, don’t you?” he questions. I nod. There is nothing I love more than playing the library game. His smile cut his wrinkles and shaped his eyes into half-moons, and we spent the whole afternoon nose-deep between the pages of Steinbeck and Mary Shelly. Scott Fitzgerald and Shakespeare. Hemingway and Orwell.
The library game has stayed with me. I nestle in the coziest corner of every house I enter and read. I read until my eyes get blurry. I read until I cannot tell between fact and fiction. I read until Bapu, a nickname coined by my elder cousin when her tongue was still too young to form the traditional word “grandpa,” joined me, pulling up a chair and reading a book of his own choosing.
“Let’s play the library game.”
My mother has been away for the past few days and my father for a few months, but Bapu and I stay home and lounge on the couch, playing the library game. His soft eyes shift left to right, zigzagging down the page. His eyebrows are relaxed, and his jaw is unclenched. I copy him.
A ring from his telephone interrupts the library game, and Bapu immediately answers. I found this odd, seeing as though he usually never even has the distracting device in the same room as him, let alone when we played library game, but his call was short, brief, and excited, and suddenly he was scooping me up in this arms and taking me to his car parked in the lot below. Our drive is unusually chatty, but I do not mind, and I think neither did he. Even in the noise, the two of us were always playing the library game.
We arrive at the hospital, and Bapu pulls me out of my car seat by my armpits and then swings me onto his hip. He whispers to me that I have a sister, and he sounds excited. Almost as excited as when he asks me to play the library game, and so I decided to be excited too.
He knocks on a door, and my grandmother opens it; her face is bright, and her smile is wide. She coos my name and asks me to meet Emma. We step inside. My mother is pale, and her eyes are tired, so I grip Bapu, my tiny fingers digging into the scratchy fabric of his cashmere sweater. But Bapu walks forward, and my mother is holding a swathed bundle to her chest, a small but proud smile thinning her lips. Bapu and I met my sister for the first time together.
“Let’s play the library game.”
We move far, far away. So far, I don’t know that the wrinkled women pinching my cheeks and whispering, “Bellismio!” do so out of endearment, even if my face burns under the pressure of their thumbs and forefingers. So far, the air smells of burning trash and aromatic pizzas that are delivered fresh from wood-fired ovens. So far, the children at my new school already have friends, and no one wants to play the library game.
I play by myself, settling along the playground fence with a book on Roman history, and I think of Bapu.
He does come to visit, eventually, both he and my grandmother, and she whisks me away to the Vatican and St. Peter’s church, admiring the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and the find-tuned craftsmanship of Michelangelo, while he takes me to ancient libraries lined with fraying books and yellowed paper. He even buys me a book or two from local shops, and we read them while playing the library game crammed into a small cafe smelling of equal parts freshly backed pastries and cigarette smoke. It’s warm, and he has to leave tomorrow, but he has made this foreign land home.
“Let’s play the library game.”
I am sitting in a room I have never seen before, but then again, as the teacher explained, only special people are allowed in, and I am one of those special people. But I don't sound so special when my mother and her talk in the room over.
“She’s behind.” The teacher whispers.
“She’s adjusting.” My mother explains. When we moved back to California, the children at my new school already had friends, and no one wanted to play the library game. I asked, just like my father encouraged me to do, but my classmates would rather climb up the slide or swing upside down from the monkey bars. It was all the same to me; the library game was usually best played in smaller groups.
“She has dyslexia, and it’s keeping her from the reading level she is supposed to be at by now.” The teacher remarks. My mother said something else, but their conversation went over my head when they started using bigger words, and besides, I was reading.
I am to spend an hour every day in the special room after school, playing the library game with the teacher, except this version included much more tears, frustration, and talking. Doesn’t she know how to play the library game? She must not, but when I go home, my Bapu sits with me, and we play the real library game. However, we fudged the rules a bit because he talked, but I did not mind. He was gentle and guided my vision even when my brain failed me. He was patient when I mixed a b for a d or an m for a w, my 9 with a 6.
By the end of the year, I did not need to go to the special room anymore. By the end of the year, my special teacher reported that I was reading two grade levels above the national average.
“Let’s play the library game.”
It’s loud, and my mother’s side of the family is squeezed into a two-story house overlooking the billowing shores of the Atlantic Ocean. I tell my cousins that this is where the Wright Brothers invented the plane, and I am so inspired that when I go home, I will dress up as Wilbur Wright and educate the rest of my class on the revolutionary discoveries of the infamous brothers. Bapu gave me a book on the Wright brothers, and we played library game multiple times a day, pausing only when he was summoned to the grill and I to join the others in making whirlpools in the jacuzzi. When I got home, I put on a tuxedo, a top hat, and a mustache, presenting the many gravity-defying feats of the Wright brothers to my class, and Bapu came, quizzing me.
“Wow, you must really be Wilbur Wright!” He exclaimed, and I beamed. After school, my mother drops me off at my grandparent's home while she takes my sister to soccer practice, and my father stays late for work. I immediately go to the living room, where elongated windows panel the spacious parlor and channel the warm power of the sun onto the plush couches. I lounge on said couch, and Bapu soon joins me. We are silent, and we read, but then again, no one can ever compete with us when it comes to the library game.
“Let’s play the library game.”
My parents used to play sports and wanted me to try it. I took to the field and the court and found that I was fast. I beat almost all the girls in the mile, and though I never got the chance to race any of them, I wondered if I could beat most of the boys, too. I picked up soccer, enjoying the physicality of the sport, and my early growth spurts gave me the means to make a good player. I often started, and I was rarely subbed.
After a while, I took on volleyball, too, and though both sports warred with what little free time I had outside of school, I always found the time for the library game. When I wasn’t on the field, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, my back resting against my chalk walls, a book open on my lap. When I wasn’t on the court, my parents would take me to Barnes and Noble, where I would spend hours laboriously deciding which books to bring home with me. They were not easy decisions, seeing as the quality of the library games depended on my choices.
When I was playing, Bapu was there. I felt comforted knowing he was on the sidelines, and even though neither of us had a book in our hands, I knew we were playing the library game.
“Let’s play the library game.”
I got to high school, and suddenly, the boys were cute. I dated, and he was cruel, and everyone told me so, but I did not listen. I had read of romance while playing the library game, and I wanted to know what it felt like to be stared at with stars in his eyes, to be hugged as if I were the only girl in the world, to be spoiled like a princess. I thought I had all those things, and maybe all along, I knew they were nothing more than a dream, but I had somehow convinced myself it was real.
I distanced myself from everyone who truly loved me and drew closer to him, like a moth to the flame. But the flame was warm, and I did not know I was burning until my wings had charred and my body had melted, and I realized how far away I was from the type of love I had read about. But I was hooked; the type of attention he offered was intoxicating and addicting, and while I felt as if the world had written me to be a fool because of it, my Bapu, quiet and caring, still allowed me to play the library game. And it is in the forgiving space of the library game, that I had come back to myself, meticulously picking up my burnt pieces and sewing them back together until I was whole again. Scarred, sure, but me. Not his, not the girls he flirted with behind my back. Not all lies and whispers that were spread about us, about me. No, I was new, and yet still me, but the library game remained constant.
“Let’s play the library game.”
I’m away from home for the first time and not for the first time. It’s my freshmen year of college, and my friends don’t mind that I still play the library game. In fact, to my heart’s greatest delight, a few friends even joined in on the game, though my stamina far outweighed theirs, it made it feel as if I were back in the sunny parlor on a plush couch and Bapu is in his chair, and it’s quiet, and we are reading.
I play volleyball, and I love my team. I am a starter, and my coaches believe in me. I exert my body, but it’s thrilling, and I am addicted to the adrenaline. We win, and we lose, but I don’t mind either way because my Bapu is at every game he can be.
I fall in love with art history, and though I’m warned it’s a challenging field to start a career in, I major in it anyway. We studied Giorgio Vasari and the Renaissance, and the professor showed photos of the Pieta and David, but I am proud because I have seen the real thing. I consume all the information I can, the library game taking a theoretical turn, but I know Bapu is ok with the change in rules because I am walking from the art history building to practice, and I would not be here if it weren’t for Bapu playing the library game since he was a child.
“Let’s play the library game.”
I meet a gangly man who reeks of a simple comfort that breeds lifelong commitment, and I am immediately drawn to him. He is kind, and I am proud to take him home to meet my parents because there is no fire this time, and my body is not burning. They get along swimmingly, and I release a breath that I have held in my lungs since my senior year of high school. I finally know what it is like to be stared at with stars in his eyes, to be hugged as if I were the only girl in the world, to be spoiled like a princess. We start our own version of the library game.
“Let’s play the library game.”
I graduate with plans to move away again, across the Pacific Ocean, to a set of tiny islands in the middle of California and Japan. It’s beautiful, but here, the roots I make are my own, and I find that I am forced to evolve as a human once again. I do not handle the change well. I lose the library game for a time as I run to weights and I sprint to practice, and I drive to my boyfriend’s house, and I host dinners with all my friends, and I watch the latest TV series, and I cram all my homework into one night, and I stay out late, and I work to pay for my ridiculously high rent, and I spiral into a pit of musts and have to’s. I am drowning.
I get news that Bapu’s mind is starting to wander, and not in the good way. My mother says he is forgetting small details and that he has been diagnosed with a rare form of dementia. But when she puts him on the phone, he calls me by my name and asks me how I am.
“Let’s play the library game.”
It is my wedding, and the gangly man is waiting for me at the end of the aisle. I am in the white dress; the day is big, and the nerves moisten my palms. My aunt comes in and asks me if her wedding ring fits me, and I try it on. It does, but my brow is furrowed until she explains that the man I will marry forgot my ring. I smile.
I made sure my wedding was in California so that Bapu could come. My grandmother has told me the dementia is consuming his brain, but that he has been looking forward to my nuptials, talking about the grand event as if a marker, a pin, in the confusing map of time. I watch from behind the fence as my grandmother and Bapu walk down the aisle ahead of me. Later, Bapu is on the dance floor, and my cousin is laughing, spilling her beer, and I take his arm in mine, gently swaying to the thump of the music. He turned to me then and asked if I wanted to play the library game.
I answer with a resounding yes.
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