8/10
My family likes their daily keg TV: Poorly produced Turkish sitcoms, music videos, Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons, imported serials, traditional instruments and vocal specials, and every once in a while Discovery Channel documentary. When the electricity goes out they have no idea what to do. Usually Mom goes to bed, Dad takes off to a café I’m supposing, and the kids either sit around and eat watermelon or, surprisingly, try their damndest to use their imagination. With a school system that has children translate from text to learn English, it’s times like this my brothers and sister struggle to keep their senses stimulated.
Today, after a 10-minute regression of acting out commercials, they switched to a game where they would hang a noun above one another’s head. They had to guess what the word above was, but no clues were given. They asked questions to the person sitting in the chair like, Is it big? Does it smell? Where’s it from? When I was invited to play, I answered questions, making up an elaborate story of this small little man on my finger named Herman who is a million years old and speaks every language on Earth, and I explained all of it in English. It was the longest running turn: at least 75 seconds. But No, the noun was Trash. No laughter, I got it wrong.
Narin asked if I knew any games, and off the top of my head I came up with “Eye Spy” and “Two Truths and a Lie.” “Eye spy with my little eye something… white.” Without a pause, he shrugs, “Wall.” “There are other white things in the room besides the wall, Hikmet.” “No, it’s boring game.” Then I vetoed Two Truths since I realized they live in together, thereby probably knowing every thing about each other. I told Hikmet he should read a book and gave him an 826 Quarterly. He flipped through it and set it down. “I don’t like to read.” A quick factual quiz game incurred until Dad came home and demanded chai. I went into my room and shut the door behind so the wind wouldn’t slam the heavy thing shut. I opened to page 25 in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Collected Novellas, to take me further from home, and maybe to set an example for a kid if he knocked. No more than two minutes later I heard fuzz and the voice of the Turkish hit man blasting from the living room.