Western Lane review: Chetna Maroo’s Booker-nominated novel is a poignant tale of grief

In Chetna Maroo’s debut novel Western Lane (Pan Macmillan India), which has been longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, grief and loss lie at the heart of a coming-of-age story where a young girl grapples with life after her mother’s death. Eleven-year-old Gopi and her sisters’ fate is debated when their mother Charu passes away. The widowed father is unable to make decisions. Uncle Pavan and Aunt Ranjan have been childless and the idea of having one of the daughters to alleviate the father’s burden only seems wise. But Mona, the elder sister, has instructed Gopi and Khush that they would not part ways. They have resolved to stick together come what may and not set off to Edinburgh to be someone else’s daughter. It is with this compelling premise that readers find their way into Maroo’s story of a grieving family unable to cope with an irreparable loss.

Spanning over 160 pages only, the story is told through the sport of squash. Whether to help the girls deal with grief through physical activity, or to find something to distract himself, Gopi’s father makes playing squash at Western Lane a compulsory activity. With the training periods upped, the girls find their bodies exerting too much on the court. While Mona and Khush resign from it after a point to take domestic responsibilities, Gopi strives to be in the court. She befriends a white boy named Ged whose mother is often found smoking with her father. For Gopi, the game seems to mean everything. She uses the court to think about the world of squash where Pakistani players like Jahangir Khan have left a mark. She sees the print of the ball on the white walls of the court as memories of bygone days, as moments of struggle in the players’ lives. The sport begins to embody an important literary symbol of struggle, perseverance and a site of tactile communication with her personal grief.

Mother-daughter relationship

The happenings at Western Lane eventually make their way to her house, manifesting as an issue. Gopi’s connection with her father’s friend Maqsud, a Pakistani man who is gearing her for a Durham-Cleveland match, is not received well by the sisters who wonder how their Gujarati community might perceive this association. At the same time, their father’s growing intimacy with Linda, the white woman (Ged’s mother) is equally frowned upon. The girls wanted a life closed in on themselves even when they were reminded, ‘you had to keep in touch with people’. This closing in, led by the elder sister, reminds the reader of the fierce sibling relation between Merricat and Constance from Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, where the sisters undertake the care of their ailing uncle Julian in the house shut to the outside world.

Jackson’s influence on Maroo’s narrative becomes even more evident through scenes depicting the deliberate deterioration and haunting of the house as the sisters begin taking more decisions for themselves. The radiators, holding ‘air trapped inside… for more than a month,’ make the house colder, while the ‘blue paint on the walls was peeling in places.’ The art of ‘ghosting’ on the court to train without an opponent, the icy whiteness of the Perspex Court where Gopi played the last match — all these images reinstate the horror that has come upon the family where Khush talks on the stairs to her mother late in the night and none of the sisters wish to intrude or question her. The nocturnal conversations slip into their days, prompting them to decline lunch invitations from their community and resort to frozen pizza when food is scarce at home.

Motherhood takes a ghostly presence in the lives of the girls, of a memory, a wound that festers over time. Gopi remembers her mother applying vermilion in the parting of her hair, preparing the glass swans with candles on Diwali like memories of a past that refuses to leave her. Her eleven-year-old mind does not understand the loss until she is repeatedly reminded by relatives how much her mother would have been affected to see them turn out thus. The lack of a mother’s presence is evident in another 2023 Booker-longlisted book — Pearl by Siân Hughes — where Marianne is unable to make sense of her mother’s sudden disappearance from her and her baby brother’s lives. Unlike the poetic yet mysterious quality of Pearl that pales by the end, the thoughtful economy of words in Maroo’s portrayal of Gopi and her sisters’ loss soars until the end into a horror. In Pearl where the story is driven toward seeking answers on motherhood, Maroo’s Western Lane is a deep plunge into the very complexity of a mother-daughter relationship where answers fade to mist.

A family yearning for redemption

Where Siân Hughes’s Marianne and her brother are saved by their father Edward and his firm presence as the protective figure, Maroo’s Gopi and her sisters are vulnerable because their living father has been equally reduced by the shared grief. The scenes of empty kitchen, soulless house and the eddies of smoke lurking around their vicinity is a reminder of the steady apocalypse that had unfolded in the Lisbon house in Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 debut novel The Virgin Suicides. The atmosphere created inside the house by the Lisbons after their 13-year-old daughter’s suicide propels the other four daughters toward taking their own lives. While the Lisbons’s failure lies at the forced regulation, the scene in Gopi’s Gujarati household is impaled by her father’s absolute resignation from his role as a parent.

To relatives who express care they say, ‘Aunt Ranjan’s afraid of us because she doesn’t know how to find out what we’re thinking.’ They gain such ideas of themselves precisely because their father has stopped functioning as he once did. Mona takes a job at a salon as a bookkeeper because he has begun shirking work and spends time smoking around Western Lane. The sadness of ‘the white bones visible under his skin — he was telling us that in one day we had exposed him, left him behind’ is felt when his daughters go to London by themselves and buy a racket for Gopi’s training with Mona’s money. The lack of routine and limited interaction with the outside world undeterred by the father make a deepening silence echo in their clipped exchanges with one another. Like the Lisbon girls, Mona, Khush and Gopi unite themselves into a suffocating idea of sisterhood to not incur another loss when the news of Gopi being sent to live with Uncle Pavan and Aunt Ranjan is dropped in.

Will Gopi be sent away? Will her sisters survive a dysfunctional father? Will Gopi accept her Uncle and Aunt as parents? Will the sense of loss wither away? How long will the period of grief keep haunting this notoriously quiet family? In Maroo’s deft narration — her showing every emotion over telling — and her use of startling images, the weight of grief slowly plants itself in the reader, ultimately leaving him/her in a state of bewilderment, confronted by the intricate web of questions it spawns. The story would have benefited from a more meticulously crafted ending. Its abruptness leaves a lingering aftertaste, akin to an unfinished narrative thread that compels the reader to anticipate another page of Maroo’s exploration into the fragile lives of a family yearning for redemption, yet grappling with questions of which the answers never come through. Unarguably, Maroo’s book stands as a formidable contender for this year’s Booker Prize.