When Gopi’s mother dies our girl is eleven, her two sisters thirteen and fifteen. Pa does his best to bring them up alone, within the London Gujarati community, sure, but with an independent spirit. He’s keen on squash, and has taught his girls to play, but this now becomes obsessional. The dominating Aunt Ranjan suggests that girls need exercise and discipline and he takes this literally; his need to keep control of their adolescence is manifested on the squash court.
They go to the courts each day after school for three hour drills of exercises and court time including ‘ghosting’ – playing a rally with an invisible opponent. At home they watch endless matches on TV, mostly featuring the Pakistani family of Kahns who, between them, had won the World Open twelve times. They are contained in a tight bubble.
Gopi gets good. She’s better than her sisters and starts getting noticed at the club. Pa, of course, wants her to be the next, great champion. “You have to address yourself to something,” he tells her, which feels more than advice for just squash. He wants his girls to have a purpose, something they can define themselves by for their entire lives. Otherwise, who knows what they’ll end up doing?
The story spends a lot of time on the squash court. The girls practise together, Pa watching and making notes, sometimes letting them figure out things for themselves. Sometimes, to Gopi, “time dragged, and the whole thing felt laborious”. I know what she means. This is, at heart, a sports story – the classic build up to a championship, though the ‘Durham and Cleveland squash tournament” feels a bit tame. Maybe it’s a pinnacle, what do I know? But the route there is never going to set my heart on fire, though there are lovely descriptions of the way squash sounds. The ball hits the wall with “a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, with a close echo.” I’ve hardly ever visited a squash court but would recognise that sound anywhere.
One obstacle to Gopi’s course to the Durham and Cleveland (and every sports story needs obstacles) is a boy who is training for the same event. Ged’s mother works in the bar upstairs so he’s a court kid, tall and awkward when he’s not hitting the ball. Then on court he is loose and smooth. Good. He and Gopi play squash together, there is tension as they grow through adolescence together, and Pa makes friends with Ged’s mum. Both these things are wrong in the eyes of Aunt Ranjan.
Aunt Ranjan herself is another obstacle. Pa is struggling with work, with the girls, basically with keeping his shit together after his wife has died. He has obvious emotional trauma, and soon his neglect of his work as an electrician means there are financial troubles, too. So Aunt Ranjan and Uncle Pavan step in with an offer to adopt one of the girls as they have no children of their own. Surely he won’t give away one of his girls, send her to go and live in Edinburgh? The girls wonder – which one? No spoilers from me here.
There are injuries along the way and grief is always there with the three girls and their father. A lot of the story is left unsaid as if we are already familiar with these people and don’t need everything explained. How the mother died, the constraints of the religion – Gopi travelling in a car with a white boy is frowned on, but such cultural restrictions are not developed. I felt a strong hit of Bend it like Beckham, in which sporty Jess is told “No more football!” by a father increasingly uncomfortable with his daughter’s modern, Western values. And there is the constant battle of the endless training, the guts of every sporting story.
This current of understatement carries through to the end where the reader is invited in to make their own conclusion, which is a pleasure, but also denies Chetna Maroo the opportunity of a grand finale scene.
With all the subtleties I believe it would make a better movie than book (something I say very rarely). Sure it will end up on the big screen and I’ll be keen to revisit it there – it might fill in some of the important things I think I missed in the novel.
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