Western Lane – Chetna Maroo (2023) 161 pages
I am not interested in sport of any kind. I’m not anti-sport either, it just completely passes me by. So a novel about squash is not one I’d leap on. But of course Western Lane isn’t about squash; I don’t really know any more about the game than I did before reading the novella. What it explores, against the background of 11 year-old Gopi’s squash playing, is grief, family relationships, and tentative healing.
“It was with a feeling of having been rescued that I raised my racket and served.”
Gopi lives with her widowed father and her two older sisters, beautiful Kush and angry Mona, whose rage is palpable as she tries to keep the home running after the death of their mother.
Their father takes them to the titular sports centre, seemingly at a loss as to how to provide support for his daughters when he is in so much pain himself. Of the three, it is Gopi who throws herself into the game.
“I began dreaming of Western Lane. I saw the white walls and the blossom outside. At night I got out of bed and went over to the windows where there was a bit of light coming through the curtains. I sat on the floor with my racket, my back against the radiator. It was silent now because it was no longer on. I fixed a new grip onto my racket inexpertly, then peeled the tape off and fixed it again.”
The characterisation is so well realised. Her father is distant and quiet, and yet still such a presence on the page. The adult reader understands more of his grieving that Gopi does, and his floundering underscored by deep love and kindness is so moving.
There is a restrained supernatural element which runs through the story. All the family at some times feel a sense of the person who is gone. This is never explained away, nor does it grow into a metaphysical/magic realist type story. Instead it serves to demonstrate how the absence of their mother/wife is a constant presence for them all:
“Maybe, I thought, she would arrive eagerly only to find that things were too solid, and that we – our bodies – were too hard for her. I wondered would our touch bruise her. Would our talk hurt her ears. When we moved would we seem to fly past her, causing her to fall back.”
They all struggle with well-meaning friends and relatives interfering at various points and the pain of this becomes deeper as it threatens Gopi’s friendship with Ged, a white boy, and her father’s friendship with Ged’s mother.
“While Ma was alive, whenever we did something we weren’t supposed to, our relatives would bring Ma’s feelings into it, as if she was easy to hurt. But she wasn’t. It didn’t matter now. Now she was gone, our capacity to hurt her seemed infinite.”
The novella builds towards a climax of a squash tournament, as Gopi tests herself for the first time against unknown players in an unfamiliar setting. But really I didn’t feel it needed this construct. The family relationships, the tensions and strains, and Gopi trying to manage huge feelings provided enough drive to the plot.
Maroo’s writing is beautifully restrained throughout the whole novella and so thankfully, Western Lane doesn’t end on a lifted-onto-shoulders-waving-the-cup moment, but something much more ambiguous and real. This wasn’t unsatisfying and the story felt whole. I was left hoping that things worked out for them all.
“The world seemed big and luminous with some secret that would soon be known to me.”
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