“SWIMMING LESSONS” BY ROHINTON MISTRY

INTRODUCTION
Life is a web of intricate choices, more so if you happen to be an immigrant. The immigrant
sensibility has traditionally revolved around nostalgia and lament. Caught between conflicting
cultures, the immigrant writers often dwell upon the themes of dislocation, survival and loss of
identity. The feeling of nostalgia is heightened if the writer happens to be a coloured immigrant in a
predominately White society. Rohinton Mistry has lived in the multicultural society of Canada
since 1975, has written about his past as well as his present, without becoming unduly sentimental.
The immigrants do have their problems, but which society doesn’t have problems? In the case of
immigrants the chasm between the two cultures leads to alienation. Mistry in his story ‘Swimming
Lessons’ portrays the superficiality of living together without actually knowing each other, and thus
projects the typical tension between wanting to belong and wanting to retain
one’s identity. It becomes a fluid identity.

ROHINTON MISTRY: LIFE AND WORKS

Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay in 1952. In 1975 he moved to Toronto and has lived there
ever since. While at the university of Toronto, he won two Hart House literary prizes (for ‘One
Sunday’ and ‘Auspicious Occasion’) and in 1985 was awarded the ‘Canadian Fiction’ contributor’s
prize. His collection of short stores ‘Tales from Firozesha Baag’, was short listed for the Governor
General’s Award in 1988. His most celebrated work is Such A Long Journey, which is set in
Bombay and got rave reviews everywhere. It was short listed for the Booker Prize; won the
Governor General’s Award; won the Commonwealth writer’s prize for ‘Best Book of the year”, and
Smith Books/Books in Canada First Novel Award. The novel has since been made into a film.
Rohinton Misty’s Tales from Firozesha Baag is a series of connected short
stories, all dealing with Parsi life in a cluttered and bourgeois apartment building in Bombay – the
Firozesha Baag. Out of a riot of colorful yet eccentric characters, emerges a hero of sorts, Kersi
Boyce, who exists on the fringe
of the stories, until he decides to migrate to Canada, near the end of the collection. ‘‘Swimming
Lessons” is the final story in the collection, in which he tries to come to terms with a different
culture, a different life. These stories have a large dose of the autobiographical element in them.
Rohinton Mistry: A Profile
Rohinton Mistry, a Parsi Zoroastrian was born in 1952 in Mumbai. He did his B.A in
Mathematics and Economics from St. Xavier's College-Autonomous, University of Mumbai,
Mumbai. He immigrated from Mumbai to Canada in the year 1975, at the age of 23, where he
studied at the University of Toronto and did his B.A in English and Philosophy. While he was
settled in Canada, he began to write stories which attracted immediate attention. He won two
Hart House literary prizes and Canadian Fiction Magazine‘s annual Contributor’s Prize in 1985.1
He has received many awards to his credit namely, Scotiabank Giller Prize, Oprah's Book Club,
Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Governor General's Award for English-language
fiction and Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada. He has also been
nominated for the Man Booker Prize, Man Booker International Prize and International IMPAC
Dublin Literary Award.
Mistry belongs to the Diasporic group of writers who thereafter settled in Canada, after acquiring
Canadian citizenship. However, he can be considered as “twice displaced”2, the first
displacement was a result of his belonging “to an ethnic group that migrated to India in the
thirteenth century AD”3, while the second displacement was a consequence of his choice to
migrate to Canada from Mumbai in 1975.
2
As Nilufer E. Bharucha mentions Rohinton Mistry’s “peoples had first become diasporic when
they had left Iran around the time of the Islamic conquest of the Persian Empire and arriving
with their sacred fires had sought refuge in India-a refuge that had seen the highs and lows of the
Islamic incursions into Gujarat, the subsequent acceptance during the reign of the eclectic Akbar,
the coming out of agricultural spaces into those of commerce and industry during the British
colonisation of India, the moving back into ethnic enclosures during the blood-bath of the
partitioning of the Indian subcontinent,
and the feeling of unease of a very tiny community in postcolonial India”. Taken from Nilufer E. Bharucha,
Preface, Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures and Transcultural Spaces, ed. Jasbir Jain. (Jaipur and New Delhi,
India: Rawat Publications, 2003) 14-5.
3
Taken from Anjali Gera Roy & Meena T Pillai, eds., Rohinton Mistry: An Anthology of Recent Criticism,
1st ed. (New Delhi, India: Pencraft International, 2007) 14.

His constant returning to India as a focal point for the themes and matter of his stories and
novels, seems to be fraught with an attempt to locate himself at a stable point, which was once
his homeland and also enables us to see within this ‘returning’ a moment of nostalgia, and an
attempt on his part to stay connected with his roots- perhaps, the only stable anchor for identity
formation, despite belonging to the Diaspora.
Indian Writing in English
'Swimming Lessons’
Rohinton Mistry,
The Evolution of the Indian-English Short Story
A study of Mistry’s narrative technique involves a study of the development of the Indian-
English short story as we know it today. Though it emerged late in the literary world, the Indian-
English short story encompasses within its fold a wide range in its subject matter as well as in the
scope of techniques used by these writers. Originating in its nascent form, earlier in the ancient
Indian classical tradition of the Panchatantras and the fables, it came into wider practise with
time in the later part of the nineteenth century, in 1898 to be more precise with the first collection
of short stories entitled “Stories from Indian Christian Life”, written by Kamala Sathianandan.4
The Indian-English short stories were largely influenced by western writers as “many Indian
writers carried the impression of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Chekhov and others,” 5
despite the fact that they were not remarkably striking in technique as they “kept close to
formulistic in design, hardly ever delving deep into the character’s psyche.”6
The focus of the early writers of the short story, as in fiction, was on trying to draw the reader’s
attention to social evils existing in India then, often trying to engage with the individual mind as
responding to these social conditions.
With the forties, the short story begins to mature and develop in form. Popular writers of this
period include Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K Narayan. Mulk Raj Anand’s short stories
reveal a sympathetic stance towards the lowly and underprivileged sections in society. While
Raja Rao’s works focus on “reflecting the Nationalist upsurge of the Gandhian days” and “are
based on popular myths.”7 He aims at presenting India revealing “the impact of its cultural past
and its tradition on its people’s attitude to life’s ups and downs.” 8 However, he confines himself
to present to his readers life in contemporary, rural India of his time.
R.K Narayan’s appeal lies in his blending of satire with humour to present common man caught
up in his daily routine and struggles presenting successfully “a fascinating cross- section of life,
though with a little variety in treatment.”9
Some of the other Indian-English short story writers include Ruth Pawar Jhabvala, Khushwant
Singh, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Keki Daruwalla, Ruskin Bond, Arun Joshi, Manohar Malgonkar,
Upamanyu Chatterjee, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, V.S Naipaul, Aravind
Adiga,Nayantara Sahgal and Anita Desai. The list provided is however not completely
exhaustive.
Women short story writers have also offered a new perspective to this genre with a heightened
level of sensitivity and perception.
Among the above-mentioned list of writers Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry and V.S Naipaul
belong to the category of diasporic writers. In its present form the Indian - English short story has
come of age, covering within its scope myriad aspects of Indian experience and life, not to forget
that the diasporic writer is also vested with the task of presenting the western world to us.
Rohinton’s Mistry’s writing, focusses largely on his narrative technique, his status as an
immigrant writer and the challenges involved therein.
Click on the link below for an interesting discussion on the same subject covered under this
section.
Mistry’s Narrative Technique in the Postmodern World
In the postmodern world of continually shifting and forming boundaries, of the never at once
settled contours of time and space, the urge to relocate even through themes and subject matter
specifies the very need to belong and construct a “community in the new borderless space.”10
There can yet be a more positive side to this postmodern condition, as not necessarily a
destabilized category, but rather as one where “with the destabilization of the fixities of space,
place and nation in postmodernity, migrancy, viewed earlier as a condition of loss of home and
exile, has come to be a privileged position and the migrant, the quintessential outsider, credited
with a double vision.”11 This is clearly noticed in Mistry’s works too, as besides offering points
to negotiate the often unsettled categories of ethnicity, place, race, language and nation that are
created through displacement, the writer offers us a double perspective with clarity and precision.
He is not unaware of the past and the situations prevailing back home, neither is he unacquainted
with his new land, which is now his home. What is offered through Mistry’s narratives then is a
multilayered text with rich resonances of India as well as Canada through the seamlessly
constructed narrative, which despite its shifts in time frames and places is woven in order to give
us a holistic experience of the journey that we undertake through his texts. The boundaries that
separate places, languages, ethnicities and races then in fact, begin to offer new ways of
beginning to approach and negotiate those sharp divides.
In Mistry’s writings we get a flavour of the Bombay of the 60’s and 70’s. Maybe, the emigrant
writer doesn’t have much of a choice since “the migrant writer in the west, in order to be
published or interviewed or even to be read is forced to write only about the country from which
he emigrated” thereby vested with the responsibility of helping to “construct an image of the
‘Oriental Other’.”12 He does not have the prerogative to write about his newly inhabited country,
since it is believed that “she/he is not culturally equipped to do so.”13
Mistry’s role in this multicultural scenario has been succinctly put forth by Spivak where she
believes that in his attempt to give voice to the marginalized migrant, Mistry’s works seek “to
authentically represent the ’nervous’ tensions at the root of the hybrid experiences of people
‘always on the move’, ‘always citational in one way or another’ ”.14 The anxieties of the
immigrant writer are primarily concerned with who would listen to him, i.e., his audience. He is
aware that he would speak from his position as a Third World citizen. The immigrant writer
needs to put on the “the intellectual make up” 15 of the English language which is so essential in
the white civilization, where he is “confined by a new set of cultural and linguistic codes.”16
Mistry’s works draw largely from myth, memories and his present experiences to convey a world
rich and resonating with his status as a migrant and also as one who has a colonial inheritance.
His narrative style is lucid but as we get engrossed in the text there are many digressions and
often concentric circles within the story, one contained within the other. His narrative style is an
interesting blend of the modern and traditional one. What we find in Mistry’s works is this urge
to homogenise and stabilise, to create identity for individuals, who inhabit the space of shifts and
geographical dislocations.
For Mistry, history needs to be probed into and problematized, rather than have people adopt a
stance that privileges a mere complacent acceptance of official history as the only reliable
version. He considers history as “the medium through which the writer has to journey in order to
retrieve individual memories, memories that are as overlapping and anguishing as histories
themselves.”17
 Mistry’s Literary Oeuvre
Concerns with individual memories and journeys are an integral part of Mistry's fictions, to name his
novels we have Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), Family Matters (2002) and The
Scream (2008). This is not to underestimate the scope of his short stories with which he began his
literary career, namely Tales from Firozsha Baag which was published in 1987 and later published in
1989 as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag.
In a novel like Family Matters, he exposes the inequalities faced by the Parsi community in India. He
brings to the fore, the question of minority status within India and despite the homogenised category of
the Indian nation-state there is a clear understanding that there is a differential treatment meted out to the
Parsi ethnic community, with the issue of identity being one of significance.
Besides the problems of identity, Mistry’s writings are from the standpoint of a postcolonial writer who is
involved with the larger agenda of “writing back” to the empire, thereby making his writings a mode of
resistance. What is striking there is that, he sticks to the realist technique in grappling with the
postcolonial realities with less scope for an experimental mode of writing. But seeing the more positive
aspect in this, he also manages to capture every single detail in his works with utmost precision.
The more pertinent question here, despite his use of the realist technique and his political stance really is,
whether his writing constitutes a significant kind of literature or not. The answer clearly is yes, for he is
well read both in India and the West.
While his success in India is understandable given the fact that India was his homeland, his readership and
success in the West is largely because of Western preoccupation with the East. But contrary to what we
might expect, here we do not find an exoticization of the East, in this case India, but rather a stereotyping
of India as poverty stricken, and often as savage or uncivilized. This kind of a perception of India appeals
to western sensibility as it furthers the notion of a progressive West vis a vis the East and clearly here
“Mistry’s choice of subject matter can be regarded as an indication of complicity in neo-colonial
hegemony.”18
The other side of this is that “Mistry’s fiction also functions as allegory, and in the process appeals to the
West by providing an image of the past.” 19 On the whole, however, Mistry is largely appreciated for his
writings. His challenge is a daunting one, in being able to express and narrate, as true to life as possible,
the life of a community
considered marginal in India and lesser known in the West. To be successful at rendering the realities and
lives of the Parsi community, he constantly needs to make choices about his use of language, literary style
and structure while retaining the uniqueness of their experiences as a community in India. Through his
writings, then, Mistry does manage to give them a voice and platform globally, as his works are read all over
the world. As Chelva Kanaganayakam mentions, Mistry’s “fiction provides a window to the world of a small
Parsi community that is isolated, flawed and often beleaguered, but always resilient and unfailingly
human.”20
Mistry’s collection of short stories entitled, “Tales from Firozsha Baag” is a collection of stories that are
linked to each other and though they are written in the realistic mode they certainly “display several
modes of alternative narrative techniques.” 21 Often the stories are intertextual and there is one larger
narrative that contains many stories within its structure. Mistry is able to offer resistance to hegemony
through a reappropriation of the master’s tongue and an attempt to use that language to convey the less
powerful group’s immediate experiences, often splashed with words better known and used by the
migrant writer. Language by being a means of resistance to the dominant group also becomes
empowering in the process.
For our purpose of study let us attempt to understand the last story in this collection, named ‘Swimming
Lessons’, through a detailed analysis of it. This story is linked to the anxieties of an Indian immigrant in
Canada to find an identity for himself in the Western space. The story does not merely offer “a
psychological journey from one point of awareness to another”, 22 but also becomes a rich account
enmeshed with the lives of other characters, who offer their insights and stories to complete the story with
these other, micro-narratives embedded within it.
Much-loved Canadian novelist Rohinton Mistry delivered the convocation speech to graduates at Ryerson
University in Toronto, in the form of a fairy-tale based on A Christmas Carol, by way of a critique of the
Canadian swing to a neoconservative right, where social spending exists only to promote "moochers" and
society is a fight between bad guys (who need to be surveilled all the time in every medium) and good
 guys (who don't mind being surveilled in such a way), and where no amount of "security" is ever enough.
Author Biography
Rohinton Mistry was born in 1952 in Bombay, India’s largest city and the most densely populated
place in the world. He grew up as a member of Bombay’s middle class Parsi community. His father,
Behram Mistry, worked in advertising and his mother, Freny Mistry, was a housewife. He obtained
a British-style education at the University of Bombay, studying mathematics and economics and
receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in 1975. He then married Freny Elavia, a teacher, and
immigrated to Canada, settling in Toronto. 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,
majoring in literature and philosophy.
During this period, Mistry became interested in writing. He studied with Mavis Gallant, a writer-in-
residence in Toronto’s English Department, and won first prize in a short story contest the
university inaugurated in 1983. He won this contest again in 1984 and added two Hart House
literary prizes and Canadian Fiction Magazine’s annual Contributor’s Prize to his list of accolades
in 1985. He published in numerous literary magazines and was one of the new fiction writers
featured in the 1986 volume Coming Attractions, 4, published in Ottawa by Oberon Press. The next
year, Penguin/Canada published a collection of eleven of Mistry’s stories titled Tales from Firozsha
Baag, which the American publisher Houghton Mifflin picked up in 1989 and retitled Swimming
Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag.
This collection, the final episode of which is “Swimming Lessons,” centers around an apartment
building in Bombay and showcases Mistry’s talent for sketching subtle, sympathetic, and often
funny character studies of the tenants of the housing complex. It has received positive attention
from reviewers, who have praised Mistry’s ability to evoke the atmosphere of the Bombay Parsi
community and his skill in narrating his stories with wit and compassion.
In 1991 he published his first full-length work, a novel entitled Such a Long Journey, which won
the Governor General’s Award for Canadian fiction and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Set in
the early 1970s during the creation of Bangladesh from the former East Pakistan, it concerns
an upper class Bombay man named Gustad Noble, who is drawn into the politics of this struggle
and becomes unhappily involved with Indira Gandhi’s government. It was shortlisted (nominated
and noted but not chosen) for the prestigious Booker Prize, won the W. H. Smith “Books in Canada
First Novel Award,” and was quickly translated into several languages.
Mistry’s latest work, a novel published in 1995, combines the political themes of Such a Long
Journey and the character sketches of the Firozsha Baag stories. Titled A Fine Balance, it focuses
on four people who live in the same apartment in Bombay in the 1970s and describes the effects of
the internal political turmoil of the times on their lives. As with his previous work, the critical
response was good and Mistry’s reputation as one of Canada’s premiere young writers has
continued to grow.