Unmasking Grief

Chetna Maroo's Western Lane is an exacting portrait of a grief-stricken family

- Saurabh Sharma

SCRUTINISE these two sentences from the London-based author of Indian origin Chetna Maroo's 2023 Booker-shortlisted debut novel Western Lane: "The echo, which is the ball striking the wall of the court, is louder than the shot itself. This is what I hear when I remember the year after our mother died, and our father had us practising at Western Lane two, three, four hours a day."

These sentences offer much more than the setting, the everyday, and the coping mechanism grief-stricken people seem to develop after losing a loved one. They not only inform readers that they're entering a bereaved household but also signal that this family, too, is bereft of the tools to negotiate with loss. Because there's seldom a mechanism that can help you process something that you expect the least but know in your heart of hearts-that what lives shall die too.

However, there's another thing that goes amiss during this process, the acknowledgment that those who die leave their marks-that their memories survive. And that's all one has to latch on to, to perform grief, to let a tear trickle down their face unknowingly, to rejoice in the illusion as if the person hasn't gone anywhere, and, most importantly, to continue with life as if nothing has happened, which means entertaining the delusion that the person might even return.