A drowning man is best approached from behind. I remembered the advice well when, one summer afternoon, I had to dive into the deep end of the pool to reach a panicking non-swimmer. He was bigger than me, but weight was no issue in the aqueous medium. I wanted to move underwater, grab him by the flanks and gently propel him towards the pool’s edge, to safety. I also wanted to stay out of his sight and, more crucially, out of his reach. If he were to see me, or hold on to me, he would have done what drowning men are wont to do: go rigid, clasp tight and take everything down with them; they lunge for you and lock you in a death embrace. In this case, the man had seen me coming, and so he made what seemed unmistakably like the drowner’s lunge. I threw him off, swam further to a spot right behind him and pushed him this time to the other end of pool. All was fine in the end. But this was when I first realised that it’s never the water, but the drowning man who is a lifeguard’s true enemy.

During the brief span I’d spent in my teenage years as a trainee lifeguard and swimming coach at the now-defunct Ranjit Hotel in Delhi, water became my only friend. I would spend close to eight hours a day — in two shifts — inside or around that small, kidney-shaped pool, delivering lessons to students young and old on ‘scissor kicking’ and ‘doggy paddling’. By the time our workday ended, I and the rest of the team would reach a state of chlorinated haze — our eyes red and stinging, with bloodless white wrinkles forming on the skin of our hands. And yet we chose to remain inside the pool, its water always warmer than the evening air, for as long as we could.

The curvilinear outline of our pool constituted for us a frame of reference unconnected to everyday reality. Your badges and honours and total-net worth amounted to nothing as you made your way from the changing room to poolside; and once inside the water, even your physical aspects — your weight and height — took on another character. This, to a boy of my age, and to the other trainers who were only slightly older than I, was an empowering thought. We considered ourselves to be top-rung in this new hierarchy. Second only to those who’d been our own coaches and mentors, one of whom was an expert swimmer and water-polo player known to us as Annu bhaiyya . He was a swarthy and well-built man, a bit too thick around the waist for a swimmer. Whenever any of us junior coaches passed him in the pool, we did so with a great deal of caution. If he felt like it, he could “make you drink water” by holding your head down until you gulped. Not out of malice. This was a rite of passage — a reptilian form of bonding between master and protégé. At times, he would glide up to one of us underwater and pull our swim shorts all the way down to our ankles, just for a laugh.

But swimming was no laughing matter for Annu bhaiyya . When he did the butterfly, it was all precision and beauty. His movements evinced a non-human grace — the greatest compliment one can pay to a swimmer — akin to some large and slithery fish that belonged not here, in this little puddle, but in the endless open waters somewhere beyond.

If in the context of a swim, the symbol of beauty is the fish, its antithesis has to be the frog. That’s what I tended to resemble most of the time while coursing through water in my preferred breaststroke. It was also the novelist Iris Murdoch’s favourite style of swimming, as I recently discovered. “I would maintain that the breaststroke is by far the most natural as well as the most comfortable way to enjoy the water,” Murdoch wrote in an essay. I was delighted to read that. But my delight was short-lived, for in the same piece, Murdoch went on to describe how 19th-century swimmers in England invented the breaststroke pretty much by imitating the “frogs (...) kept in tubs beside the new municipal swimming pools as a means of instruction”.

The larger point Murdoch was making in that essay is one that is seldom acknowledged by swimming enthusiasts of our time: that real swimmers find joy only in natural waterbodies, not in the dismal confines of some public or private pool, which, in Murdoch’s words, “is just a machine for exercising in”. In that sense, the treadmill becomes analogous to the swimming pool, just as a walk in the woods is comparable to swimming in a pond.

This brings me to Neddy Merrill, the protagonist of ‘The Swimmer’, John Cheever’s saddest story. After having a booze-induced breakdown, Merrill decides to “reach his home by water” by doing the length of every swimming pool in his suburb. At one point, he reaches a municipal pool “that stank of chlorine and looked to him like a sink”. Later, he lands at a private pool that is drained of all water; the owners are not home for the summer. Merrill walks across the length of this pool’s floor and resumes his strange expedition. Cheever here has taken Murdoch’s “pool as a machine” metaphor to a new extreme — the empty swimming pool in Cheever’s story becomes a metonym for the emptiness of modern life. When I think of Merrill, I think of a man drowning. And I think of that never-before-seen figure we come across in Cheever’s tale: a drowning man in a waterless pool.

Vineet Gill is a journalist with The Sunday Guardian

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