Page 64 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“As serious as I can be. I don’t feel one hundred percent sure that I’m not a

puppet myself,” I said.
“No wonder I like you,” you said. The ghost gave me a high five.
“You need a puppet,” you went on. “Competition for places is quite fierce—
people do what they can to stand out. Some people make their own puppets. I
did, out of paper and pins. The thing fell apart mid-performance, but I built that
into the story.”

—

MUM AND DAD wouldn’t be thrilled by my new career ambitions. Don’t forget
your Uncle Majhi . . . Majhi the mime . . . and ask yourself, do we really want
more people like that in our family? My parents worked a lot—no need to bother
them with something that might not work out. The thing to do was gain

admission first and talk them round later. I bought a brown-skinned glove
puppet. He came with a little black briefcase and his hair was parted exactly
down the middle. The precision of his parting made me uneasy; somehow it was
too human at the exact same time as exposing his status as a nonhuman. I got
him a top hat so I wouldn’t have to think about the cloth hair falling away from
the center of his cloth scalp. You gave me a hand with some basics of
ventriloquism, even though you definitely weren’t supposed to help—it was then

that I began to hope that you’d stop saying I wasn’t right for you—and I taught
my puppet to tell jokes with a pained and forlorn air, fully aware of how bad the
jokes were. Sometimes you laughed, and then my glove puppet would weep
piteously. When you took the glove puppet he alternated between flirtatious and
suicidal, hell-bent on flinging himself from great heights and out of windows. I
noticed that you didn’t make a voice or a history for the puppet, but you became

its voice and history. I’d have liked to admire that but felt I was watching a
distressing form of theft, since the puppet could do nothing but suffer being
forced open like an oyster.
—

WE DECIDED it would be better for my puppet to continue the daily translations—
my great-grandfather’s book, line by line, first in Hindi, next in English, as you

listened, rapt, and then repeated the line in Russian and French. Thus the book’s
bones were broken. I didn’t realize it until about a week before my audition,
when I reread the book’s last chapter, which I was yet to translate for you, and
the bright words flew through my mind like comets. That feeling was gone from