'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.
