Western Lane: Grief, sport and colour in 1980s London

CHETNA Maroo’s Booker-nominated debut, Western Lane, is a tender coming-of-age story, negotiated through restrained prose, on the unspeakability of fresh grief.  

After the untimely death of her mother, 11-year-old Gopi and her sisters Mona and Khush are thrust into the sole care of their father, an Indian immigrant who makes a living as an electrician in London. 

The four struggle to get by before Gopi’s father, or Pa as he is known in the novel, decides that the way forward for his young family to cope with the loss is through complete dedication to a sport – squash. 

He fills up the empty hours training the girls at the nearby sports centre in Western Lane, putting them through a gruelling and rigorous regime.

The story is told through the voice of Gopi, the most talented of the three sisters, as she smashes her way towards a small local tournament, facing setbacks both sporting and personal. 

Maroo’s novel speaks without speaking, and shows rather than tells. The author writes deftly around emotions, capturing with poignant accuracy how words can break and fail in the face of grief, leaving only action as a recourse.

A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU

Friday, 2 pm

Lifestyle

Our picks of the latest dining, travel and leisure options to treat yourself.

Sign Up

For example, after a disagreement with Pa during a training session and feeling fearful of abandonment, Gopi hits him in the face with her racket.

Both their feelings go mostly unstated, and the author leaves it for the reader to decide whether the girl hit her father on purpose or by accident, or a messy mix of the two. 

Ambiguity runs through the novel. But rather than muddy it, it is used in a way more akin to delicate juxtaposition. Maroo intersperses Gopi’s narrative with the child’s recounts of squash history and tactics, as told to her by Pa and various South Asian “uncles”.

In these stories, Indian and Pakistani athletes compete on equal footing with Caucasian ones, often beating them.

Against the novel’s backdrop of 1980s London, these stories acquire additional poignancy as the family grapples with the complexities of assimilation and social mores within their community. 

For example, Pa’s fledgling relationship with a white British neighbour is constantly watched by the various “aunties” unrelated to the family. It also causes strife with his daughters, who carry unstated expectations that he would hold the household together as their mother would have. 

Maroo places these two narratives of racial politics side by side, and, in doing so, makes no grand conclusions or statements to the reader or on Gopi’s behalf, preferring to lay the complexity out before us over attempting to analyse or explain it. 

All this is driven by Maroo’s simple, understated prose. She hews close to reality, rarely reaching for the lyrical, and allows the tragedy of the situation to speak for itself.

This creates a tight and focused narrative, a close-up, detailed image of one phase in a child’s life when she shakes off loss and begins to grow.