The weight of things unsaid

Chetna Maroo makes the reader work for it, reading, absorbing, and picking out the nuggets that she casually folds into the tale

Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane was on the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist. This slim debut book, the story of a squash prodigy named Gopi and how her family of two sisters and a father cope with the enveloping sorrow of losing their mother and wife, punches far above its weight.

Maroo makes the reader work for it, reading, absorbing, and picking out the nuggets that she casually folds into the tale. It’s a quiet narration by the 11-year-old Gopi, emotions are mostly held in check and there’s much left unsaid but all of it clearly visible to the reader.

Once the lady of this Gujarati household passes away, the three daughters and their father are all equally lost, and desperately try to find some strategy to carry on despite the keenly felt loss. It doesn’t help that the father suddenly becomes the focus of targeted kindness in the Indian community, especially from women with matchmaking tendencies. The girls are all special: Mona who was a dab hand at accounting and even worked at a salon for a brief spell; Khush, ‘her eyes so lovely you could cry just looking at her,’ and perceptive Gopi who could observe a funfair and see it was a sad place, where everything was too bright and too big.

The way out, then, seems to be playing squash as a strategy for surviving life. So onto the dilapidated squash courts in Western Lane, on the outskirts of London, where the father puts his girls through a gruelling training regimen. The three siblings had always played squash but not so intensely, not so competitively. The elder girls play as a matter of routine, it’s Gopi who turns out to be a real talent with the racquet.

There’s much about the squash great, Jahangir Khan, and his strategies for his games. We aren’t the Khans, one of the girls firmly tells their father but, in fact, Gopi finds the game, the daily grind of practice, the anticipation of going to play at the Durham and Cleveland tourney, the perfect refuge for her bottled-up grief. When she develops a crush on Ged, her partner on the courts, it makes the routine of her life that much more exciting.

But, of course, there’s more happening at Western Lane than just Gopi steadily improving her game. Life isn’t only about playing squash, as they all find out.

Life is about negotiating the broad river of grief and helplessness that flows near them, navigating it without quite acknowledging it. Because, as a family, they aren’t given to expressing emotion openly. But Pa is falling to pieces and not even Gopi’s prodigious talent is a sop. There is a King Lear touch in here, in that all the daughters love their father and would do anything to impress him. As equations shift, the girls try their best to cope with it. Here is Gopi musing on a moment with her father: “When I (looked at him) there must have been something terrible in my expression because some creature, limping and friendly behind his eyes, seemed to back away.”

A subtle coming-of-age narrative, a human drama, a squash story, a look at sibling relationships, this is a heartwarming story but even as it warms your heart, it breaks it into little pieces… only to piece it together a little later. There are passages such as when Gopi hears her father tell a British woman who might or might not be the object of his interest, that sometimes he feels like his girls would just eat him up; such as what she does in a sudden unexpected retaliation to that devastating comment; such as the casual mention of casual racism, when she reflects that if one was alone, no one spat on one from a height or told one to go home.; when she tells us that after her mother’s death, the girls had been careful always to appear with their hair washed, their nails cut, their clothes clean; or the time when talking about her game, Gopi reflects that a clean hit can stop time and that sometimes it can feel like the only peace there is. A hushed tale that holds in it much emotion.