Learning swimming is important for the protagonist because he feels that he must know swimming to be one among the Canadians otherwise he would just be an outsider who was living with them but was not one of them.
His initial inability to swim is symbolic of the difficulties he faces as an immigrant.
But his resolve to take lessons in swimming and consequently to swim would make him like the other Canadians whose culture he would assimilate.
Swimming has been used as a metaphor for his acceptability by the new culture.
Rohinton Mistry’s “Swimming Lessons” is not very dramatic. Very little actually happens in the story and the narrator seems to miss a lot of what does happen until other characters point it out to him.
There are some minor social interactions, numerous finely-turned descriptions of scenes from the narrator’s daily life, and several cutaways to his memories and scenes of his mother and father in Bombay.
Nor is it like the short fiction of James Joyce, whose addition to the genre was the concept of the “epiphany,” or sudden psychological realization on the part of a central character, as an alternative to Poe’s single effect.
Mistry’s closest historical model is the turn-of-the-century Russian writer and dramatist Anton Chekhov, whose “psychological realism” chronicled the ordinary lives of pre-revolutionary Russia’s middle class.
While avoiding dramatic scenes, Chekhov gave readers insights into the hearts and minds of his believable and sympathetic, if shabby, characters.
Likewise, Mistry explores the loneliness and anxieties of his modern ensemble of unremarkable people.
His characters fill today’s sterile apartment complexes rather than estates on the outskirts of Moscow, but the feeling is the same.
Nothing happens, sentences never quite get completed, even the title event of the story, the swimming lessons, don’t work out and are quietly dropped.
Just beneath the surface, however, the characters lead lives of quiet desperation and make bumbling attempts to reach out to each other.
They engage our sympathy because Mistry makes them real and likable despite their pettiness and quirks.
The narrator in the story undertakes creative writing in order to understand both the present and the new cultures.
At the outset, it appears as if the story collection is a substitute for the narrator’s weather-report-like letters to his parents.
It also shows how he is recreating his past and childhood through memories of his life in Firozesha Baag.
The story portrays Kersi as having taken yet another step in the process of adaptation, without losing his roots. It is the only one story that is fully set in Canada.
However, even here the Canadian world is juxtaposed with Indian memories. The maximum impact of displacement and alienation is reflected in this story.
It also deals with his personal identity, recollections of his homeland, and his adjustment to a new ambiance.
Kersi attempts to yoke the realities of existence in Bombay and Toronto and discover the true essence of human existence, which is the same community.
He explores the problem of dual identity that must necessarily shift its precincts. Though he sheds his ethnic identity in Canada, the white society is still not home”.
The protagonist in this story is an exile in the true sense of the term since he faces rejection in the white man’s land. Here, the protagonist is not a native’ but an immigrant who may be viewed negatively by the white majority.
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