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Thursday, March 17, 2022

SWIMMING LESSON, INDIAN ENGLISH WRITING, ANALYSIS, SUMMARY, NARRATIVE STYLE, Rohinton Mistry

 

'Swimming Lessons'

Rohinton Mistry's 'Swimming Lessons' is part of a collection of short stories that throw a light into the relationships of three generations of Parsi families struggling with life in an old apartment in Canada. By the end of 'Swimming Lessons,' character-families learn about social activism, come out of the over-protectiveness, and enjoy living in a new apartment. Parsi community is confronted with a menace of extinction due to varied factors, which has led to the collateral emergence of ethnic identity among its members regarding its survival in the next century. The instinctual adjustment into their immediate ambiance has been the token of survival for these dwindling community members who have been witness to the centuries of social and cultural cleansing. Rohinton Mistry, being a member of the Parsi religious community in India, makes an attempt to pledge a glimpse into the life of the people of his community and their experiences as belonging to the marginal class in an eminently diverse society

 



Rohinton Mistry was born in 1952 in Bombay, India’s largest city and the most densely populated place in the world. His father, Behram Mistry, worked in advertising and his mother, Freny Mistry, was a housewife. He obtained a English education at the University of Bombay. He studyied mathematics and economics and received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1975. He worked as a banker to support himself while taking night courses at the University of Toronto and completed a second baccalaureate degree in 1984. He majored in literature and philosophy.

“Swimming Lessons” has been created from the author’s viewpoint. There is also the third person to depict Kersi’s parents’ responses to the letters Kersi sends from Toronto. The story takes place in an apartment complex in the Don Mills suburb of Toronto, its elevator lobby, its parking lot, and, when the protagonist goes out to take swimming lessons at the local high school pool.

In the beginning, he contrasts events in his new environment as against those back in the Bombay housing complex called Firozsha Baag, where he grew up with his family and myriad-natured neighbours. There’s a depiction of a few of them, such as “the old man” (he is never named) who waits for people in the apartment lobby for small talk. It’s his favourite conversational game to ask people to guess his age. Kersi is reminded of his own grandfather, who had Parkinson’s disease and sat on the veranda of their complex waving at anyone who would pass by.

 



The narrator introduces the old man, the Portuguese woman in Toronto, and flashes back to Bombay. The narrator reveals more about himself. He is candid about his erotic urges as he describes spotting two women sunbathing in bikinis beside the parking lot and his attempts to get a closer look. They turn out to be less than attractive at a close look.

He remembers a conversation with the attendant at the pool registration desk in which he tells her about his “non-swimming status” and she in turn justifies why she never learned to ride a bicycle. There is a long memory based on incidences of swimming, water, and religious festivals related to water in the narrator’s life before immigrating to Canada. He goes into reverie about his newly purchased swimming trunks and recounts a sexual fantasy about them that indicates his high hopes for an erotic encounter at the upcoming swimming lessons.

Then, there is a shift of memory to India where the narrator’s parents are seen conversing about their son in Canada as they write to him. The first section of the story closes with the introduction of Bertha, the building superintendent, who is yelling at her son as he plays with his van in the parking lot. The narrator narrates her tirades and the family’s general situation including Bertha’s hard work at the apartments, her husband’s factory work and occasional alcoholism and the son’s apparent unemployment.

The second section begins with the narrator’s first swimming lesson. There are some insults heaped from white teenagers as he leaves the locker room. His erotic fantasy materialises in his mind. He describes his excitement as a woman in the group demonstrates floating face up. He is terrified when he is asked to paddle to the deep end. He almost goes under.

Kersi’s parents receive a parcel from Canada. It is a copy of the manuscript of stories Kersi has written. His parents are surprised to find that, while he is living in Toronto, the stories surround the panorama of Bombay.


 


Time passes in Toronto. Bertha rakes leaves, her son stops working on his van when it gets too cold, the bikini ladies flirt with Kersi in the laundry room, the old man is given a ride in an Oldsmobile by his son, and the Portuguese woman keeps watch all over it.

As winter deepens, the heat goes off entirely in the apartment complex. Bertha shovels snow, the old man suffers a stroke and dies. Bertha’s husband and son leave her, the old man returns, and far away in Bombay’s Firozsha Baag, Kersi’s parents finish reading of his stories. They are proud, although the father thinks he has focused too much on inconsequential people and his mother thinks he must be homesick since he only writes about Bombay and not Toronto.

Kersi tells in great detail the process of his taking a bath in his apartment. He ruminates on water imagery and finally gets the nerve to go completely under the water, even though it is only in his bathtub. As he is submerging himself he decides he should find out the old man’s name only to learn that the old man died in the night. The story ends with an italicized passage, as Kersi’s parents are writing to tell him how proud they are of his accomplishment as a writer. They are looking forward to read his next book.

the narrator parallels his life in Toronto with reminiscences of his life in Bombay. Swimming Lessons  focuses on the life of a new immigrant: loneliness, racism, and cultural adjustment, through a veiled autobiographical character, Kersi, the Indian immigrant protagonist of Mistry.

An important feature of the story is the setting that moves with the narrator from Bombay to Toronto and allows Mistry to draw an equivalence between the lives of the residents in both of these crowded, cosmopolitan urban settings through the use of parallel stories, imagery. The story tells us the predicaments of the transition of an immigrant struggling to fit himself in that alien land. The story takes place in an apartment complex in the Don Mills suburb of Toronto, its elevator lobby, its parking lot, and, revolves around the protagonist, Kersi, who ventures out to take swimming lessons in the local high school pool. It was his the very first baby step towards integrating with Canadian culture. On being joined as an outsider, Kersi feels that the place is “the hangout of some racist group, bent on eliminating all non-white swimmers, to keep their waters pure and their white sisters unglued” (p.288).

 

The pool served as a metaphor for diving into a higher class free of impurities, a symbol of Canadian assimilation, which shows no place for non-whites. It shows a deep dislike for immigrants.  Racism and stereotyping are evident when three young boys treat Kersi as inferior by looking at his complexion while he is changing in the cloakroom before beginning of the swimming lesson- “One of them holds his nose. The second begins to hum, under his breath: Paki Paki, smell like curry”. The third says to the first two: “pretty soon all the water’s going to taste of curry”.

Kersi realizes that he has been subjected to unfair generalization like many other immigrants. The fear of swimming lessons sets in. He thinks how others will receive him, and this gets him off to a bad start by the boys’ crass association of his skin-colour with ‘curry’. Kersi finds it below dignity as a brown immigrant in an alien land. As he used to use the term “Ghatis” in India for low class, inferior people to discriminate them from his own class, his own community as he believes that Parsis have been privileged citizens and are held in reference to post-colonial India, whereas the Ghatis are the low class people belonging to the rural areas of Bombay, generally unaccepted by the civilized upper class communities because of their ethnic, economic inadequacy.

Jacqueline, an inhabitant of Tar Gully in Firozsha Baag makes a reference to such ghati people. Now that Kersi is an immigrant to Canada, he has become a kind of Ghati unconventional to its people and their culture. Local Canadians consider the advent of Parsis and other Indian immigrants as the racial imposition to their society.

Kersi is haunted by much possible trepidation: he fears drowning, which may allude to a fear of rejection from a new community, a “symbolic death”. He understands that he must learn how to ease into the water, and to float before diving. Rebirth alludes a transformed immigrant, who is well adapted to the new environment.

Kersi’s parents thought he would be happy, comfortable and successful in Toronto until they came across the manuscripts authored by their son. They did not know Kersi possessed the writing skill. As he keeps relying on writing stories to give a way out to his suffocations and anxiety, they have become the expressions of his unhappiness, his failed religious acquaintance, nostalgic feelings about Bombay basically revolving around his own community and most importantly alienation that keeps haunting him every now and then.

Kersi seems to have been associated with unsolicited people. He craves for intellectual interaction with the old man who eventually dies at the end, leaving behind a wakeup call for Kersi. There is a feeling that Kersi has tried intensely to integrate into the Canadian society. While the societies at Toronto and Bombay are literally worlds apart, the characters of “Swimming Lessons” in the end give an analogous impression to their Indian counterparts in a gloomy, miserable, petty, and often humorous attempts to find dignity and human connections in the isolation of modern urban apartment living.

Characters

Bertha

Bertha is the apartment building superintendent. She is a hard working middle-aged Yugoslavian woman who spends much of her time trying to get her husband and son to be as hard working as she is. She is demonstrative, loud, and unconcerned about how she is perceived by her neighbours when she yells at her spouse or son. Her husband works in a factory and drinks alcohol.

Bikini sunbathers

Like most of the characters in “Swimming Lessons,” the sunbathers are minor figures who serve primarily to reveal the narrator’s thoughts and feelings. First seen from a distance, they are objects of desire as Kersi gawks at them.

Mother and Father

The narrator’s parents are the only major characters in the story other than himself. They are presented as individuals and as a couple who have lived together for many years.

The father at first will not answer Kersi’s letters because he dislikes their short and impersonal tone. But when he receives his son’s manuscript of stories, he becomes interested and writes to give him suggestions about writing.

The mother is less interested in criticising Kersi’s writing. She reads his work to guess how her son is living and feeling in that alien land.

Narrator

The narrator’s name is never mentioned in the story, but he is clearly the same Parsi Indian character named Kersi who appears in several of the other stories of the Swimming Lessons collection. Although shy, Kersi becomes gradually “westernized”. He enjoys displaying his new cultural knowledge. He helps model the old man’s son’s car. He observes people keenly in his apartment complex. He pens about them. This is evident from the manuscript he sends to his parents in Bombay. He lives a life full of memories of Bombay and he frequently compares his new life in Canada.

Old man

This is an unnamed character. He will soon turn seventy-seven. He sits in his wheelchair by the elevator of the apartment complex and makes small talk with the tenants as they pass down the hall. He seems somewhat senile, but the apartment tenants indulge him and he engages everyone equally. He has a son who visits and takes him for rides outside for entertainment.

Portuguese woman

The narrator designates her as “PW,”. She is nosey and wants the narrator to know about all the goings-on in the apartment building. She feels low when anyone gives her information. She wants to be the one “in the know.”

THEMES:

Cause and Effect

The narrator mentions his grandfather’s osteoporosis and a fall that broke his hip. Did the weakened bone cause his fall or did his fall cause the break? This leads him to wonder that the Bombay Parsi community has the highest divorce rate because the society is western influenced. Conversely, it is the most westernized because of its divorces. The waters of Bombay are filthy because of the crowds or if the crowds gather because of the chance to pick through the filth and junk.

Do Bertha’s husband and son leave her because she is always yelling at them, or does she yell because she knows they are going to leave? It serves to give an overall sense that life is mysterious and that one does not know why things happen. The narrator’s parents wonder if he writes about Bombay because he is lonely in his new home, or if he had to go to an alien society to delve into his old past.

Alienation

Any immigrant feels being “a stranger in a strange land,” as the saying goes, but an immigrant of colour in modern western society must feel especially lonely and alienated. It is clear that the narrator is isolated and attempting to make connections with other people. The old man dies without anyone in the apartment ever getting to know him. The Portuguese woman (PW) makes her observations and retreats behind her door. The superintendent’s family disintegrates. And the narrator makes no acquaintance or friend and the swimming lessons work out no better. In fact, no character makes any significant human touch with anybody else in the story.

Purification

“Water imagery in my life is recurring,” says the narrator as he contemplates Chaupatty beach in Bombay in his childhood and the pool at Toronto where his swimming lessons take place. Water and filth are mutually extended symbols, but in this story they blend, both in the narrator’s present reality and in his memory. His childhood is a grotesque mix of filth, religious symbolic purity, and raw sexual energy. This works well as a symbol of the unconscious mind, an unregulated chaotic mixture of the sacred and the profane.

Rohinton Mistry's short story "Swimming Lessons" is a canonic short story of Canadian multicultural literature. It owes its anthological status in the background of Canada. It narrates the issues of origins; relevance or irrelevance of immigrant's ethnic origins in a host country; cultural, religious and ethnic diversity, and freedoms guaranteed by the official Canadian policy; Canada as the role-model of multiculturalism; and the everyday functionality social model in cities. Discussed are the issues of aging and old age; alienation and/or community; personal development.  On the metatextual level, this story harnesses Mistry’s own poetics.

The story focuses on many elements that are often seen in the life of a new immigrant through a use of parallel stories, imagery and effective diction. In “Swimming Lessons” the narrator (Kersi Boyce) describes his life in Canada as well as connects with his past and parents living in Bombay. The story begins with the narrator’s encounter with an old invalid man living in his building, who reminds the narrator of his own grandfather, another invalid. Both the old people are immobile, and both find it difficult to pass their time.


(Toronto)


The Portuguese woman is an inquisitive type. She disseminates information about people living in the building to anyone who would care to listen. She informs the narrator that the old man’s daughter took care of him. The narration goes back and forth in time and space, as the narrator depicts on the sick man in Toronto and his grandpa in Bombay. He remembers how his mother used to take good care of grandpa too, till things became very complicated and he had to be shifted to a hospital. He remembers even the minute details of his Grandpa’s illness, and the struggle that his mother had to do single handedly by changing dressings, changing bedpans etc. The narrator also helped, but didn’t go to the hospital as often as he should have. And Grandpa ultimately died in the hospital. The narration of the story in Toronto is intersected by his parent’s reactions in Bombay to his letters. This typical writing style makes this much readable.  Such reactions are given throughout in italics, making it a sub-text connected along with the main narrative. Kersi is alone in Toronto, writing a book of stories about his life in India, and taking swimming lessons, finding the chlorinated water of the local pool as foreign an element as the suburban life around him. Mistry cleverly includes within this story a commentary on and a critique of his own writing. Kersi has sent his book home to be read by his proud but uncomprehending parents.

Mistry thus unites two traditions in the short story; the conservative, semi-autobiographical mode that connects stories of childhood; and the newer self-reflexive mode in which the story comments on itself. Tt flashes back and forth in the protagonist’s mind. Mistry aptly shows the difficulty an immigrant faces when making a transition into another urban environment. Kersi’s daily encounters with myriad situations at Canada trigger memories or thoughts that relate to similar situations back home. There’s a tinge of both culture shock and a fear of rejection from the white society.

Narrative Technique

Written in the first person narrative form, The story is unique and quite interesting. The narrator describes his life in Toronto and compares his past living in Bombay. His parents’ reaction to his writings has been juxtaposed. The narration of the story goes back and forth in time and space, as the life of his parents in Bombay, their relations and expectations intersect the narration of his life in Toronto. It rotates around his present life and memories of his past. When he looks at the sick man in his building, he remembers his sick grandpa in Bombay and how his mother used to take good care of him till things became very complicated and he had to be admitted to the hospital where he died.

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