Ghosting and Grace in "Western Lane"

By Spencer Gaffney 

There’s a practice in squash training known as ghosting. A player stands alone on the court, racket in hand, and simulates the motions of the game, moving precisely to different spots on the court and swinging at an imaginary ball before quickly recovering back to the center.

Ghosting is exhausting, physically and mentally. It’s supposed to be: you’re grooving the motions so that they become second nature, ensuring that your body knows the proper way to move even when you’re on the fifth game of a grueling match. But within that exhaustion is the possibility that the practice taps into something more than training—a kind of heightened awareness subsumes all other thoughts and feelings and offers a sense that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.

“Pa believed in ghosting, and so did I,” eleven-year-old Gopi tells the reader in Chetna Maroo’s slim debut novel, Western Lane. Gopi describes the feeling that comes to her in the midst of a punishing ghosting session: “The surfaces and dimensions of the court were clear to me, and I knew my place within them while feeling, at the same time, that I was nowhere.”

Western Lane follows Gopi and her family in the aftermath of her mother’s death, set against the backdrop of the Gujarati community in the UK in the 1980s. Gopi, at the urging of her father, immerses herself in squash. In a novel that charts the ways in which people mourn, the sport offers Gopi the possibility of something like grace–the chance to be absolutely present and simultaneously transcend not only the strictures of the court but also her grief. 

Western Lane, however, resists easy answers or sweeping declarations about the power of sport or the “right” way to grieve. Even as the repeated physical actions of the squash court are a salve for Gopi, the novel is as concerned with the ways in which her father gives in to the siren’s song of a very different kind of ghosting, attempting to recall the dead, even as he increasingly abdicates his responsibilities to the living. 

Western Lane focuses much of its attention on the daily banalities of squash training rather than the excitement of competitive match play. The object for Gopi is mastery of the form – squash as a kind of moving meditation that allows her to disappear, for however long she’s on the court, into the familiar rhythms of practice. The novel, in its focus on the repetition and drudgery of practice, resists the cliches and familiar beats of a traditional sports narrative. This works in part because Maroo is deeply in tune with the sensory experiences of being on the court, from the sound of a ball ricocheting off the wall of an adjacent court to the “soft throbbing” through a player’s body when playing and hitting well. 

But it also makes for a quieter, more somber novel, denying the reader the kind of catharsis that often comes at the end of the big game. Even in the climactic tournament that closes the novel, the question of whether Gopi wins or loses is almost beside the point—we’re reading to understand the possibilities, and inherent limitations, of the sport as a means of healing her family.

While ghosting is initially introduced in the novel as a squash training method, the idea accumulates additional weight and meaning in the context of how the other family members attempt to process their own grief. In the early pages of the novel, Gopi’s sister Khush appears to have a conversation with her mother in the dark early hours of the morning, her sisters listening from their bedroom with some combination of fear and envy.

The girls are desperate for any kind of connection they can attempt to forge across the gulf between the living and the dead, however tenuous it might be. Here, too, Maroo focuses on the ways in which people seek out the sort of physical comfort that Gopi eventually finds on the squash court, showing the sisters standing beside the broken radiator that their father–formerly competent and handy, now laid low by grief–has been unable to fix. “We wanted to feel the knocking as we stood against the radiator,” Gopi says. “We understood that the knocking was only air trapped inside. We wanted to feel it.”

That kind of craving for comfort is natural in the context of what these girls have gone through. But Maroo is also deft in showing how that desire for a connection with the dead brings with it the risk of abandoning the living–yet another kind of ghosting, and one that Gopi’s father increasingly succumbs to over the course of the novel. From the first chapter, the specter of Gopi being sent off to live with relatives in Edinburgh looms over her story.

Gopi is at first certain that her father would never allow such an arrangement. But over the course of the novel, we watch him withdraw further into himself and his grief, spending his time watching grainy VHS tapes of famous squash matches over and over and having late-night visitations with his dead wife, becoming, in one memorable, heartbreaking description, a man “eaten away by rats.”

While the novel’s quiet tone mostly works to its benefit, the lack of any tonal shifts, even at times of heightened tension, risks undermining the effectiveness of those moments. When Khush tackles Gopi’s oldest sister Mona at a funfair, upset at Mona’s insinuation that Gopi’s friend (and crush) has only come out of sympathy for their dead mother, I found myself needing to re-read the passage several times to make sure I understood what actually happened. The scrum is quickly forgiven, and the girls return to their protective cocoon of one another, seemingly without any lingering effects. 

Similarly, while at training one day, Gopi accidentally overhears her father say “probably the saddest thing he’d said out loud in his whole life” to her squash partner’s mother: “The children. The girls. Sometimes I look at them and I think they will eat me.” Later that day, during a match against her father, Gopi hits him with a ball square in the face: “I had my whole body behind my racket, so that when the ball made contact with his jawbone there was such a resounding crack that you might have imagined for a second that the ball had passed right through him and split against the side wall.”

Being hit by a squash ball is a painful, if common, risk in the game–I’m writing this now with a squash-ball-sized welt on my left calf–but Gopi admits that there was no legitimate shot she could have tried to hit that would have put her father between her racket and the front wall, leaving the reader to ask why she’s done it. Is Gopi fulfilling her father’s dread prophecy? Punishing him for his fear and his failures as a father? Or seeking some form of connection, however violent, with the man who is increasingly receding from her life? I admire the way that Maroo allows this sort of ambiguity, trusting the reader to sort through the complicated emotions without needing to spell things out explicitly. But the power of these moments lessen somewhat by the tonal sameness of the prose, and the consistent sense of cool remove.

Ultimately that sameness of the writing, whether describing the dynamics between the sisters or on the court, keeps the experience of reading the novel from being as dynamic as the underlying story might otherwise be. Maroo as a writer seems content to return to the same stylistic choices over and over, like a player hitting long, precise rails into the deep corners and waiting for their opponent to make a mistake. The quality of the prose is good enough to keep things from tipping all the way into monotony; I’d be excited to read whatever Maroo writes next. But I hope that she has the confidence to mix in the linguistic equivalent of some riskier kill shots and allow a bit more excitement to seep into her prose.

I’m not a particularly good squash player. I see more than a bit of myself in Gopi’s description of the sort of amateurs who people Western Lane, the sports complex where she practices: “Men who thrashed about, running at the ball and smashing it as hard as possible.” None of that, for someone who actually knows what they’re doing, is a compliment. I suspect that if Gopi and I ever met on a squash court, she would beat me handily.

But all the same, I recognize the ways in which physical motion, and the rigors of squash in particular, can function as a way to try and process grief when all else fails. I’ve never dealt with loss anywhere near the magnitude of Gopi, and it would be fatuous to suggest otherwise. But when I moved back to New York in 2021, in the wake of a divorce and alone for the first time in a decade, I decided I needed to find some way to physically work my way through my newfound situation. I had played a bit of squash with friends in college and thought it might be good to pick it up again. I found a club with low court fees, took a few lessons, and joined a box league. 

When I started playing, I found the sport intimidating, both technically and physically. I didn’t know how to move, the proper way to hold a racket or the right shots to hit in different situations. But there was still something promising about the all-consuming demands of the game. I could push myself past the point of my lungs and legs’ screaming want-–it was only in the hours after, and the next morning especially, that I could feel the ways in which I’d overtaxed my body. Soon, I was playing three or four times a week. It was worth it for those moments on the court when nothing else existed and I could be nowhere at all.

Squash isn’t a cure-all for grief; nothing is. Western Lane doesn’t try to pretend otherwise. Instead, the lingering power of Maroo’s novel is the way she depicts the possibility that on the court, there is the chance to find some modicum of grace, however temporary.