The ghost observed that I was going to come to the end of my translation one day.
“Yeah, but come on. We’re only halfway through the second chapter. And after this book there are fifteen others by the same author.”
The ghost asked if I thought my great-grandfather would be impressed by this use of his hard work.
“Oh, ghost — what have you got against love?”
Nothing, said the ghost, sounding injured. She had nothing whatsoever against love. She was just saying.
The ghost showed that she was on my side when she heard you mention the news that you were one of the two final-year students who got to select a newcomer to mentor. “It’s going to be fun. We get to watch the applicants through hidden panels in a soundproofed room so they don’t hear us booing or cheering them.”
This terrified me, but the ghost breathed on the windowpane and wrote FOR GO IT on the misted glass.
“Who’s the other student?” I asked. “Not green-haired Joe?”
“Haha, no. Though he does put on interesting Punch and Judy shows. Dad says he’s going to be very good one day. The other student’s a boy called Gustav Grimaldi. I don’t like the way he performs; it’s scruffy. And I’d say his puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you’d understand what I meant by that.”
“Nihilistic, eh… sounds bad,” I said, pinning the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I googled “nileistic.”
“Sometimes his puppets won’t perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they’d decide to keep their mouths shut forever. There’s no entertainment in it at all, and I don’t understand why he chooses this way to put on a show when he knows so many other ways. He shouldn’t be allowed to choose any new students. If there’s anyone bound to introduce unsavory elements into our group, it’s Grimaldi.”
“Good thing I’m extra wholesome then. Do applicants have to have experience with puppets and all that?” I asked, and when you said that in fact your father liked people to come to the field fresh, I asked if fifteen was too old to start.
“Not if you’re serious. Are you?”
“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 the other chapters; somehow it had seeped out. And I told my glove puppet that it was not to say the final words of the book.
The ghost approved, but she was also quite sure that you wouldn’t choose me if my glove puppet didn’t say the words we’d planned it would say, you and I. The ghost even advised me not to bother turning up. Naturally I disregarded her advice. A couple of days later, the waiting room of your grand old school encased me in marbled fog as I watched other hopefuls practicing with their puppets. Some were more actors than puppeteers, but others handled their marottes and tickle puppets and Bunraku puppets with an ease and affection that didn’t exist between my glove puppet and me. I think the soul must be heavy and smooth, Myrna: I deduce this from the buoyant, jerky movements of puppets, which lack souls. The girl beside me was very pretty — tousled dreadlocks, dimples, and night-sky skin — you know, with this radiance blended into the darkness. But I considered myself taken, and so I merely asked where her puppet was. “It’s this.” She took a small box out of her jacket pocket, and out of that box she took a porcelain chess piece. A plum-colored queen, her only features her crown and a slight wave that conceded the existence of hips and a bosom.
“Did you make her yourself?”
“No, I found her. I know she doesn’t look like a puppet, but she is one. I know it because when I first picked her up I said something I’d never said before. I put her down and then when I picked her up I said the thing again without meaning to, and again it was something I hadn’t said before, even though the words were the same.”
“What’s her routine?”
“At the moment she only asks this one question, but I’m hoping to learn how to get her to ask another.”
“What’s her question?”
The girl looked uncomfortable. She pointed at her nametag: “This is me, by the way.” Tyche Shaw. My own nametag was lost in my hair, so I shook hands with her and said: “Radha Chaudhry. What’s your puppet’s question?”
Tyche mumbled something, too low for me to hear. I’d just decided not to ask again — maybe she was saving it up for the audition — when she repeated herself: “Is your blood as red as this.”
A chess piece asking a personal question, possibly one of the most personal questions that could be asked. I didn’t know how to answer. At my instruction my glove puppet shook its head, No, surely your blood is redder. Tyche turned the purple queen around on her palm and asked the question again; this time the note of challenge left her voice and the question became droll; the next time the chess piece asked her question she sounded worried, seeking comparison for the sake of measuring normality. Frustration came next (after all, the chess piece wasn’t even red… therefore as red as what, compared to what). From what you’d said about Gustav Grimaldi’s puppets I knew you would strongly disapprove of the question Tyche Shaw’s puppet asked; in fact you would hate it. But this tiny queen’s question was large; she spoke and you couldn’t think of anything else but her question, and how to answer it. The sharpest thing I had on me was a brooch — I could prick my finger with my brooch pin, and then we would see.