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Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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In the aftermath of their mother’s death, a strangulated silence envelops the house Gopi shares with her older sisters, Mona and Khush. The beauty of Maroo’s novel lies in that unfolding, the narrative shaped as much by what is on the page as by what’s left unsaid. What drove you to invest so much editorial energy in this unspoken communication between characters? What made you choose sport - and squash in particular - as a way for the family to deal with their grief?

He said this, but with his eyes and his body – his shoulders, his throat, the white bones visible under his skin – he was telling us that in one day we had exposed him, left him behind, left him wide open to whatever was coming for him. In a reflective moment about her creative process, Chetna Maroo shared insights during an interview, where she explained that the book had been essentially crafted as a compilation of dense short stories, mostly in the first person. Chetna Maroo resides in London and has contributed her stories to esteemed publications such as the Paris Review, the Stinging Fly, and the Dublin Review. The novel follows Gopi, an 11-year-old girl who has been playing squash since she could first grasp a racket.Gopi is attuned to subtle details that offer clues to the inner lives of the adults around her: Pa’s failure to fix a radiator, low voices in the garden at night, a spilled glass of chaas. She mentioned that as she delved into these narratives and explored other novels, she encountered the challenge of maintaining a consistent narrative voice.

Cautioned by a concerned relative to find a healthy outlet for his daughters, Pa turns the family’s casual weekly squash game at a local sports center into daily, determined training sessions. Western Lane is about a young girl and her family who are grieving the loss of a family member, and who channel this grief into squash. Just as important to the novel, and just as vivid, is the almost inexpressible experience of a human body negotiating a transparent box, the heightened awareness that “Jahangir had for a situation, his sense for what was going on behind him”. How does it feel to be nominated for the Booker Prize 2023, and what would winning the prize mean to you - especially as one of several debut novelists on the longlist? As I began writing, it made sense to me – the way attention is focused outwards in the game, the concentration, the movement of bodies in sync with one another.Hers is an unhurried performance, as if leaving open breathing room for the unspeakable, the absent, and perhaps even a little space for hopeful potential. Gopi is attracted to Ged’s stammer because “it seemed like you were drifting close to him in the silence”. Maroo has a talent for making the space she needs for emotional complexity by way of physical description. It’s humbling to see Western Lane amongst all the books that have been longlisted in the history of the prize. There is a love interest, Ged, whose mother intervenes at just the right moment for the plot (and the wrong moment for Gopi).

Soon Gopi discovers a talent that draws the attention of Ged, the son of the club’s white manager, who becomes her training partner; and Maqsud, a Pakistani businessman and avid squash player who convinces Pa to enter his daughter into a tournament. The language barrier meant they “pulled at her, pushed into her, made ourselves physical in her presence”. At the same time, the girls’ aunt and uncle watch the family, hoping to help Pa by taking one of the girls to raise as their own. Chetna Maroo’s debut novel begins a few days after 11-year-old Gopi’s mother’s funeral, which leaves Gopi and her two older sisters in the care of their father.I had the feeling that spoken language had become a wall for the girls, an obstacle to knowing and being known. They struggle to manage their grief under the suspicious gaze of their close-knit Gujarati community, with no help from their distant and distracted father. This conveys all the tensions – between care and resentment, responsibility and envy – that play out over the course of the story.

Gopi cares how her feet fall on the court, the curve of her arm through the air, how close she can keep to the “T”.My own process seems unwise to me because I know I’ll eventually cut sections that I’ve spent weeks or months going over, but I have no other way.

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