Page 62 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“YOUNG LADY, I’m flattered—and tempted—but—how old are you, anyway?”

you asked. Then you said I was too young. Too young, not right for you, blah
blah blah. Always something.
Joe and Arjun appeared with our coats, and you slid my book out of my coat
pocket. “What’s this?”
Fate is what it was. Yes, fate that the book I had with me was a novel written
by my great-grandfather, a text you couldn’t read because my great-grandfather
had put a permanent ban on any of his works being translated into English,

Russian, or French. He was adamant that these three are languages that break all
the bones of any work translated into them. Since people like getting around
rules, there are various unofficial translations of my great-grandfather’s books
floating around online, but all of them just seem to prove his point.

—

“JUST TELL ME the beginning of it, then,” you said, and I opened the book to
translate for you. You liked the beginning—a woman opens her front door to
find a corpse on her doorstep, but before the body can topple across the
threshold of her home she says, “Oh no you don’t,” pushes it back out with a
broom, and legs it out of the back door.
“Wait,” you were saying, as I walked away arm in arm with my brother

—“Hang on, Radha, I need to know—”
“I’d say she’s at least an eight,” my brother said, surprised. (You have my
permission to make him regret marking girls’ physical appearance out of ten.)
When I got home the ghost immediately knew something was up. She said she’d
been wondering when I’d meet someone.
“If I—I don’t know, if some sort of miracle happens and I have sex with

someone, will I stop being able to see you?”
The ghost looked crafty for a moment, then relented and said no, I was stuck
with her. And she was pleased for me when you phoned me the next day to ask
me to translate the next paragraph of my great-grandfather’s book. You hung up
as soon as I gave you the paragraph, but the ghost said you’d come back for
more, and you did. You began to talk to me a little after each day’s translation,
asking me questions about myself and my day and whatever music happened to

be playing in my bedroom whenever you called. “Glad you like it—I don’t know
what this song is called, but it’s probably quite a bit older than we are. The truth
is we’ve got a nostalgic ghost for a DJ around here,” I’d say, and you’d laugh,
thinking I’d made a joke.