Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

Author:Chetna Maroo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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MONA STOPPED GOING to work. She stopped going anywhere except school and Western Lane, and to the cash and carry when Pa agreed to take us, or else to the VG store. The manager of the hair salon phoned up and Mona said she had too much homework and couldn’t come anymore, and would he let the others know please. But she continued to take care of the house.

Khush and I sat in the fort behind the house and went over what had happened at the funfair. Khush said that Mona liked Shaan, but even before 7 Seconds had turned up with her skateboard, Mona wasn’t going to do anything about it. Mona couldn’t bear the thought of Aunt Ranjan or anyone else calling Pa to complain that his daughter was going around with a Pakistani boy, and what about the shame on Ma, who was gone? While Ma was alive, whenever we did something we weren’t supposed to, our relatives would bring Ma’s feelings into it, as if she was easy to hurt. But she wasn’t. It didn’t matter now. Now she was gone, our capacity to hurt her seemed infinite.

Mona did have homework, and so did Khush. They came to Western Lane for only an hour a day and, soon, only on Saturdays. It was their decision and Pa did not question it. I no longer practiced with them at all. Once, Maqsud brought his cousin’s daughter for me to play but she didn’t like my hitting hard and by the time I realised this, it was too late, and after that it was just me and Pa and Ged.

Pa and I returned home from Western Lane late in the evenings, and it would seem to me that a long time had passed since I’d seen my sisters. I’d open the fridge to get milk or head straight out into the garden to go up and down the path on my skates and replay the week’s games inside my head. Sometimes, skating up the path, I would think of Ged, of his steadying me when I came off the Twister, or his placing the ball when I was hurt, and I would let myself remember, and then I would no longer be in the garden. When, finally, I came in, Pa would look up from his papers and he would just stare as if he was startled.

“It’s Ma,” Khush would tell me later. “You look like Ma.”

If we arrived at home to find that Mona hadn’t cooked, Pa would wait for me to come in and he’d send me and Khush to the VG store. We’d come home with tins of baked beans and mini frozen pizzas, which would make Mona angry with the three of us. What visitors we had were very interested in what we ate every day and this, too, made Mona angry. Her moods did not seem to trouble Pa. He didn’t seem to notice.

One evening, I became nauseous on the court and Pa, who was on the balcony with Ged’s mother, came down and told me I needed to eat something.

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