Thursday 4th April. I finally managed to swim the 25 metre length of the pool without stopping.
When I reached the other side and looked up, I realised that the instructors and some of my fellow students had been clapping. It felt good.
I have been learning swimming for the last couple of months. It was something I had wanted to do for quite some time. But I only got to start it after giving up flying (now with the little one being there, I could neither afford the money nor the time needed in pilot training).
I hadn’t started from scratch. I had learnt a little swimming when I was a kid. I remember when I was very small my parents had taken me for swimming lessons for some time. And then me and my cousin sister would sometimes go with my uncle to the public swimming pool.
But the modest attempts had never been very systematic. And when we had moved from our rented house in the city to our own house in the outskirts all of this stopped. There were plenty of ponds where we moved to but no swimming pools.
It’s difficult to learn how to swim in the ponds. The water has a wild smell – a mixture of fish and rain and mud and water hyacinths, rather than chlorine. The smaller ponds have no steps. Some of the bigger ones have ghats so you have a couple of steps. But then nothing, your feet just sink into the squishy mud (mush?) – you never know what is there. And there isn’t a nice gentle slope towards the deep end. They are usually bowl shaped. So everything other than the edges is the more or less the deep end.
So I never learnt swimming properly. I could do a bit of freestyle (in a very literal sense – sort of throwing my arms and legs around in a random fashion and managing to float for a few seconds). But I would tire after going a few feet. And I couldn’t tread water or float on my back or do anything else which most people here seem to do so easily. So I could only watch and feel jealous.
So I have been going every Thursday. And while it seemed impossible at first and my lungs felt like they would burst, I have managed to slowly improve. I am still jealous of the people who seem to effortlessly go from one end to the other and keep doing it lap after lap. But at least I am getting there…
Invictus 
