It started with the feeling of being inside a squash court, with a voice saying, ‘There were three of us. Gopi cares how her feet fall on the court, the curve of her arm through the air, how close she can keep to the “T”. What drove you to invest so much editorial energy in this unspoken communication between characters?

With Pa, she spends hours “ghosting”, which means playing with something crucial missing – the ball – in a practice that seems more significant “than a rehearsal or drill”.Cautioned by a concerned relative to find a healthy outlet for his daughters, Pa turns the family’s casual weekly squash game at a local sports center into daily, determined training sessions. The sisters have always spoken Gujarati, their mother tongue, but not well enough to converse easily with their own mother, and so when she was alive the girls had learned to read her body and to communicate by being physical in her presence. Just as important to the novel, and just as vivid, is the almost inexpressible experience of a human body negotiating a transparent box, the heightened awareness that “Jahangir had for a situation, his sense for what was going on behind him”. When she's on the court, she feels more connected to her father and connects with Ged, who also excels playing squash.

She mentioned that as she delved into these narratives and explored other novels, she encountered the challenge of maintaining a consistent narrative voice. It is not so much the shot itself that Gopi is hearing, but that echo, the empty reverb, the lonely response as the ball’s impact gives the striker a split second to retreat to the T, the center of the court, and prepare to counteract her opponent’s responding shot. I didn’t have a plot or outline for the whole novel, but I had a sense that the story would turn on this one question: would Pa bring himself to let one of his daughters go? As I began writing, it made sense to me – the way attention is focused outwards in the game, the concentration, the movement of bodies in sync with one another.Instead, she’s listening to the sound of the ball hitting the wall on the adjacent court, “a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, with a close echo. When Gopi occasionally remembers something about her mother, it is visceral – watching Wimbledon while eating strawberries with sugar. At the start of Chetna Maroo’s polished and disciplined debut, Gopi, an 11-year-old Jain girl who has just lost her mother, stands on a squash court outside London.

I usually try to get each sentence and paragraph sounding right before I go on, reading and editing from the beginning of the story. My own process seems unwise to me because I know I’ll eventually cut sections that I’ve spent weeks or months going over, but I have no other way. The tension is heightened by squash-obsessed, emotionally uncommunicative Pa; fearful Aunt Ranjan is the obstacle that stands in Gopi’s way.To navigate the sport’s punishing constraints, Gopi learns, you “have to find the shots and make the space you need”. In the unlikely arena of a high-pressure tournament match, she finally discovers a place where “no one was rushing me, and if I wanted to, I could think”.