Gopi has eleven yearsAnd orphan recently and every afternoon he plays squash for two to four hours with the two older sisters Mona and Kush. They train at Western Lanea sports center just outside London.
When T begins (Adelphi, 2024, translated by Gioia Guerzoni; finalist for the Booker Prize 2023), Chetna Maroo offers us an atmosphere from Bildungsroman punctual and an accessible plot: a family of a widowed father And three orphaned daughters still grieving tries to heal; the adult of the house tries to do it for everyone, but we immediately understand that he succeeds little or nothing; there is something, beyond the mourning, that holds him back both in his words and in his gestures. She believes that having them train every afternoon gives all three a purpose and help them overcome the loss of mother.
In fact, Mona, Kush and Gopi started the business and they did it alone: starting over without a mother and with a father whose most intimate and human sides the girls finally see, the ones that are difficult to manage and in a certain sense to understand. Those, ultimately, that necessarily lead them to grow, with a push on the accelerator.
T has short chapters. It melts into fluid descriptionsintimate passages and then change pace when he talks about the pitch that comes to life, becomes body and movement, Gopi’s matches and those of the players of the past and therefore the story of emotions it passes through this physicality.
The body of the three girls he communicates with the movement, while Pa seems concentrated on himself, on his mourning. He tries to be present but almost always finds himself in silence and even when Aunt Ranjan and Uncle Pavan from Edinburgh want to give him a hand, these presences are more like a blatant interference, but he seems to leave things to the course of events. The idea of his uncles is that he alone with three girls would not be able to take care of them. He would let them grow badly, without real guidancewithout a timely control which is necessary.
Mona, Kush and Gopi go to schoolI am introverted, are poorly integrated into the school context. In the first part of the story they all move together as a universe apart from the other members of the family. Each tries to find contact with their own mother and in parallel with the father. Their idea of family and mourning is communal: the units that make up their world are not isolated units, but are pieces of the puzzle they have need to compose oneself.
However, they are incapable of fully understanding the father as of speak Gurajati, the mother’s favorite language, that relationship recognition device that they know how to understand in sounds but not in words. They speak English with their father, but it’s no use, he is silent. They weren’t able to have long conversations with their mother and so they replaced the word with gesture, with physicality and now they don’t know how to find each other in the physical relationship because the physical language has become squash, which has nothing to do with Gurajati. They have lost the communication device, the mother’s body, and the communication device with the father continues to function poorly.
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In Chetna Maroo’s novel, the native language is only named, like a dress lost in the memory of an important occasion. And in the memory of the protagonists it becomes sensation, smell, sounds, the physical memory that was the focus before and comes to life again. When the three girls seek contact with their mother, the language comes to their aid – especially to one of them, Kush, who often whispers words in Gurajati that the others do not understand – because when she was alive that very language was an obstacle to relationship: “We always spoke in English with dad and uncles, but not with mum because she struggled, even if she understood. And we didn’t know the Gurajati so well. That’s why we listened to mom so carefully and didn’t take our eyes off her. This is, perhaps, why we were close to her, why we continually sought physical contact.”
In the father’s suffering, the girls can’t get in. They observe it, though. They follow him. They notice changes. But from afar, without getting close to that body. When Mona gets a job, for example, she tells her father about it, looking for a reaction, but he doesn’t get it. The sisters are ultimately a group, while he is completely alone in the undertaking. Or at least that’s how it seems.
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As with Gujarati the three sisters have a passive relationship – they are unable to act with their tongue, to put it into practice – with the squash that they practice every day, however, the relationship is active, it is all-encompassing. Squash occupies their afternoons almost obsessively: it is the practical way to keep the mind occupied and overcome grief.
But only for one of them does it also become something else. Gopi finds herself the best on the fieldto govern the lines of the ball, the movements, the racket like a native speakeras if he had found within himself, hidden somewhere, a bridge to get out of it.
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The beginning of the novel is already a partial revelation: Gopi is training on the pitch and talks about the sound of the ball: “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the center of a squash court, on the T, to listen to what is happening in the nearby field. I think of the sound of the ball being hit by a firm, clean shot. A low, lightning-fast sound, like a gunshot, followed by a close echo.”
The squash court is not a neutral place, but it is not a mother place. Indeed: it is the father who knows the players of the past, watches the matches with his daughters, with Gopi in particular, builds a common vocabulary with them based on the movements of the sport. The limited space, the finite possibilities, the rules, the methodical nature of the training mean that Mona, Kush and in particular Gopi have little time to think about mourning (but not about their mother) and instead have many opportunities to spend it on the racket, on the ball, to the T. To a closed and limited space where you can let the thankless emotion flow.
Mona, however, isn’t really interested in the game and Kush has a physique that is not suited to that type of practice and movements, and he often gets injured: Gopi is the only one who finds real interest, she’s good, she wins. Gopi is fast, surprisingly powerful. He has a response to grief that no one expects and finds a bridge with her father that other girls can never have.
When Gopi begins to exalt herself in sports, leaving her sisters to heal themselves in other ways, a new world is born whose forms a select few know. Two of the main actors are Gopi and his father; secondly Uncle Pavan and then Ged, a boy who occasionally trains with Gopi and frequents Western Lane.
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The squash tongue is silent, made up of specific gestures, precise sounds that predict the result of the shot. There is no need to talk to play, nor to improve at the game and in this the father is perfect. Gopi learns to move and understand this language of silence and adopts it. She is the one who describes it to us in the book, she tells us about players whose videos she has seen repeatedly, especially Jahangir Khan, about their ways of thinking and acting on the pitch.
He learns the sport and in the meantime builds his education among the living, which resembles that of the father, but is not identical, which even speaks to uncle Pavan and his sisters who, outside of squash, become spectators. Only aunt Rajan remains completely out of it, the one who is only interested in the formal education of her nieces, in their entry into adult society which should not be limited by the fact that they have lost a mother, therefore a guide, a prerequisite for growing up respectable .
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Gopi finds a starting point with squash, between training first and then matches, she discovers Ged, a boy she really likes without knowing why, lives his adolescence between well-aimed shots and a prudent pace. He understands where his father’s profound discomfort comes from and that breaking away, distancing himself, and then returning is the only way to heal.
The mother and the native language gradually fade in the story and in the healing of mourning what remains is something each of the characters can claim for themselves. From a small community lost in the same pain, people emerge with one more memory and one more possibility.
“When you are on the field, during a match, in a certain sense you are alone. And rightly so. You have to find your way out. You have to choose the right shots and look for the space you need. You have to hold your T. Nobody can help you. No one can focus for you or be afraid of losing for you. But sometimes the opposite happens. On the pitch you feel like you’re anything but alone.”
