Chetna Maroo's 'Western Lane'

In younger and fitter days I played squash. It is an unforgiving and intense environment: you are stuck in a small bald box with the ball hurtling hard at you from all directions, as you execute a sweaty pas de deux with your opponent. So it come as a surprise to find this experience as the unifying thread of a novel concerned with grief and childhood in a Gujarati-Jain family in modern Britain. Indeed, it is there right from the first sentences:

I don’t know if you have ever stood in the middle of a squash court - on the T - and listened to what is going on next door. What I’m thinking of is the sound from the next court of a ball hit clean and hard. It’s a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, with a close echo.

The following 160 pages in Chetna Maroo’s début, Western Lane, are similarly tight, both in style and mood. 11 year-old Gopi’s mother has died, leaving also her two older sisters Khush (13) and Mona (15) and their father. As they try to cope with their grief, squash becomes increasingly important. Their Aunt Ranjan tells Pa that 

What we girls needed was exercise and discipline and Pa sat quiet and let her tell him what to do.

Her father is so often quiet, and one of the moving things about the story is how through the bewildered filter of Gopi’s consciousness we see his struggle with grief. He ‘believed in ghosting’ (a training technique), and is indeed himself haunted. Another touching strain in the book is the development of Gopi’s delicate and unformed feelings for Ged, a 13-year old boy she sometimes plays, whose mother (white, from a different culture) works in the bar upstairs from the courts and is trying to connect with Pa.

There are other pleasures: descriptions of Indian food, the depiction of the sisters’ relationship, the portrayal of the childless Aunt Ranjan and Uncle Pavan. Above all, and increasingly so as the book approaches the climactic Durham and Cleveland tournament, there is the squash court. The story is expertly shaped within its tight dimensions, within the consciousness of this young girl, while also attending to the echoes from the adult world which one day she will join.