I Learned to Swim in a Flooded Street
The monsoon closed our school and opened a swimming pool.
The best swimming pool of my childhood was forty feet long, chest deep at the manhole end, and technically a municipal road.
It appeared every July in front of Building No. 4, conjured overnight by three days of proper Bombay rain, the kind that falls like it has a personal grudge against the city's drainage department. The drainage department, in its defense, never once disappointed us. Other children waited all year for summer holidays. We waited for the radio to say the magic words, schools closed today, and for the gully to fill like a bathtub with the tap of heaven left running.
I was nine the year Guddu taught me to swim in it.
Guddu was fourteen, the undisputed emperor of our lane, a boy who could whistle through his fingers and claimed to have once touched Sunil Gavaskar. His swimming academy operated in the stretch of brown water between Sharma Uncle's scooter, submerged to its handlebars and visibly ashamed, and the milk booth, whose raised platform served as our diving board, though diving was a generous word for what we did, which was falling with commitment.
His teaching method was one sentence long. "Move everything and keep your mouth closed."
That was the syllabus. He held me flat under my stomach with both hands, told me to kick like the water had insulted my mother, and then, with the treachery that separates great teachers from safe ones... removed his hands without informing me.
I sank, swallowed a quantity of monsoon I still think about during health checkups, surfaced screaming, and discovered I was moving.
Not gracefully. Not in any recognized stroke.
But moving, forward, on my own, in water too deep to stand in, nine years old and suddenly enormous.
I can still feel it if I close my eyes. The rain hammering the water around my ears. Somebody's blue slipper floating past like a small boat. Mrs. D'Silva on her first-floor balcony shouting that we would all die of typhoid, cholera, and disobedience, in that order. And under everything, the sound I now know was the sound of pure joy: forty children screaming in a flooded street, each scream ending in a splash.
My mother's reaction deserves its own paragraph. She stood at our window, saw her only son doing what she later described as "drowning on purpose in gutter water," and produced a sound that cut through the rain, through the screaming, through the entire monsoon, a single "SHAAM-uuuu" that hit me like sonar. I was dried with a towel that felt like sandpaper and fed a preventive dose of home remedies that tasted worse than the flood. It was worth it... it was worth it every single July.
These are my monsoon childhood memories, and for thirty years I kept them in the drawer marked golden.
Then came the July, three decades later, when the same city and the same rain taught me the other half of the lesson.
I was thirty-nine, coming home from work, when the sky opened the way it does once a decade, and this time no radio was calling it a holiday. The trains stopped. The roads went under. I ended up wading two kilometers through water the exact brown of my childhood, and it was not a swimming pool.
It was cold and it was rising and it had a current... an actual current, on a street where buses ran. Around me were office workers holding laptop bags over their heads, an old man gripping a railing with both hands, a young woman crying quietly into her phone, telling someone she did not know how to get home.
And here is the turn I did not see coming: my body knew what to do.
Not metaphorically. Physically. My feet read the road through the water, remembering that manholes live near corners and that the middle of the lane is safest. I knew to walk behind the woman and break the current for her. When the old man's grip slipped and he went sideways into the deep stretch near the bus stop, I went in after him without a single thought in my head, and the arms that pulled him to the raised platform of a shuttered shop were not thirty-nine years old. They were nine... they were kicking like the water had insulted my mother.
Sitting on that platform, soaked, heart hammering, holding a stranger's trembling hand, I started laughing, and the old man looked at me with reasonable concern. I could not explain it to him... I had just understood that Guddu's academy was real. That every July of my childhood, while our mothers screamed about typhoid, the flooded street had been quietly conducting a class, and the final exam had simply taken thirty years to arrive.
Childhood is the only age at which a failed drainage system looks like God opening a swimming pool, and maybe children are the ones seeing it correctly.
But I owe the mothers their paragraph too, because becoming an adult in this city means finally reading the flood from the balcony instead of the water. That beautiful brown bathtub of ours was also the ground floor of the Kadam family's single room, and the year I learned to swim was the year they lost their mattresses, their ration, and a trunk of wedding photographs. What fell like a grudge from the sky landed like one, on the people with the least. Joy and damage came down in the same water, and the children got the joy because the adults stood between us and the damage, the way adults do, the way I never noticed until I became one and found myself standing there.
Guddu drives a taxi now, in the same city. I found him two monsoons ago through a chain of building group chats, and we drank cutting chai at the same milk booth, which has outlived governments. He did not remember teaching me. He had taught so many of us, an entire generation of the lane, that we blurred into one composite child, kicking and sputtering. When I told him about the old man at the bus stop, he shrugged with the modesty of emperors and said, "Mouth closed, everything moving. It works."
I went home that evening and could not sit still. There was a writing exercise I had seen that week, one line long, and it would not leave me alone: write about the water in your life. It turned out to be the prompt that started it all, the first poem I ever finished as an adult, forty lines about a submerged scooter and a blue slipper and a sonar mother, and finishing it felt exactly like that first forward motion in the flood, ridiculous and unstoppable. Everything I have written since comes from the same water. Almost all of it is really about childhood, that country we are all deported from, and the rest is about hope, which is what joy grows up to be. My best memories refuse to stay golden or dark. They insist, like monsoon water, on being both at once.
It is raining tonight as I write this. Proper rain, grudge rain. Through the window glass the streetlight has turned every raindrop into a running yellow line, and from somewhere below, four floors down and thirty years back, I can hear children screaming in the good way, which means the drainage department has come through for a new generation.
I opened the window and leaned out into the noise, an old man on a balcony now, the exact species of adult who once shouted about typhoid.
I shouted the only syllabus I know.
"Mouth closed! Everything moving!"
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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