A couple of weeks ago I nearly drowned. I was on my first lap of the day, charging along from the pleasure of being in a pool that didn’t feel like where Putin went ice-fishing. My old home Delhi is just far enough in memory to feel like a pleasant place to visit and do touristy things. A bookstore or two may have given up the ghost in my absence but the best place for cold badam milk is still good. I haven’t yet lost my ability to say “Chalo bhaiyya” and persuade auto drivers to take me to distant places, a skill I don’t even attempt to exercise in Bengaluru, so hopeless are my chances. Best of all, in Delhi I know where I can go to swim any month of the year.

So as I was saying, I was charging along in this perfectly warm, perfectly cool pool and at the three-fourth mark began the slow process of drowning. I did it in an unhurried way. First came the thought that I couldn’t possibly swim any further because of how tired I was. Then the thought that this pool was rather deep at the deep end — unlike the politically correct pools I usually swim in which acknowledge that it may be good to be a nation of shorties when you are on a 17- hour bus ride or in a movie theatre but otherwise not so much.

I’ve swum in the deep end of this pool before when the deep end was still a new trophy of conquest and didn’t frighten me. But now on this April morning it terrorised me. It suddenly seemed impossible that I can even summon the energy to swim the three strokes to the side of the pool. It was too much and I couldn’t do it. I was dizzy, worried and began to go down. I began to go down not like someone who has been swimming — at a modest level of competence — for years. I began to drown not like someone whose favourite new trick last summer was to swim at the bottom of the pool between the ankles of willing victims. I just flapped my arms about uselessly and bobbed in and out of the water, gasping. Every time I surfaced, I yelled “help”, sounding comical to even my own ears, and further deepening my misery and conviction that this was the end. To misquote Stevie Smith’s poem I was ‘waving and drowning’. Out there was the bright summer day and happy swimmers, and in here was the cool blue and me drowning quietly.

After several of these up and down ventures, I felt the light grip of one of the swimming coaches on my arm. And almost instantly my panic disappeared. I did what I’ve done for years when tired in the pool — flipped on my back and floated. My saviour didn’t have to drag me into the light, just tow me like a tugboat. If tugboats are lithe and muscular, that is. He checked that I wasn’t dying and went back to the children he was coaching. I hung to the lip of the pool feeling foolish. For the first time in my brief career of persuading reluctant children and adults into the pool, I suddenly understood why so many were convinced that they just couldn’t. I am usually extremely sympathetic and repeat over and over again, especially to children, that I had no hideous plan to suddenly let them go — this being an extremely popular and evil method of instruction all over the country. Though I had been sympathetic, I had not quite got their suspicion that the laws of physics and their bodies would let them down. Or maybe they were suspicious of their minds. I hadn’t been obnoxious enough to say “just do it”. But I hadn’t quite understood the panic either. If you just calm down you’d float. No? Actually, no.

I’ve fresh understanding of what goes on inside my nervy nephew each summer as he ventures toward the pool, inch by inch. I also had a refresher course in rejecting rationality.

You hear it all the time: why don’t people just leave their difficult marriages? Why don’t they just quit drinking? Why don’t they just lose weight? Why don’t they just? As if our lives aren’t full of inexplicable urges and unexamined beliefs. As if even the beliefs examined closely immediately yield neat nuggets of meaning.

Sometimes our drowning minds take over our swimming bodies. And we are really lucky if we can make it to the side without anyone sticking around to shame us or gloat over being our saviour.

In the last couple weeks I’ve gone a few times to the pool. And swam nervously towards the deep end. Each time I forced myself to look down to the inviting depths and rejected its cold comfort. I had the jitters and fresh respect, if not for the waters of the neighbourhood pool, definitely for the murky bits of my mind which sometimes refuses to just.

@chasingiamb

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