Nope.
He wouldn't overthink this one. This time, he would dive right in, and hope that it all just came naturally to him. After all, it was just water.. Er.. Right?
And what happened next was.. Well, let's just suffice it to say that over-thinking or not, he should've at least been prepared to move his arms - Because now he was just flapping about wildly, and all that did was remind one of ducks. And this heavy duck of a boulder.
But this was not going to deter him. Whatever energy he wasn't already using for the ‘flapping’, he was saving it to brush aside anyone who came forward to help. It was quite another matter that no one actually did. Cursing and spluttering, he somehow managed to climb his way out and stayed there till he could calm his nerves down.
After an infinite time as it seemed, it finally occurred to him to that maybe he shouldn’t have burnt himself out by flapping blindly. But more importantly, he knew what the real problem was - He was simply too tall! He had always said he was too tall for his own good and there would be consequences for this gift of his, and now it was actually coming true. So the problem now was that every time he couldn’t stay afloat, which was basically the whole time, he’d just take the easy way out and stand himself up. He needed to forget he had any legs. He needed to learn to think like a fish!
This wasn’t as much of a shining moment, in retrospect, as this only saw him completely stopping to use his legs in his preparation of ‘becoming a fish’. One day he came into work with a fish bowl over his head with a pipe in for breathing.(He said it was so he could learn to see better under water). On another, one guy dropped some change in front of him because he thought he was handicapped. In the stranger's defense, Rohan was sitting down on a side of the road with his legs folded back. Also, his tie had come loose, his hair was unruly, and he was sweating after a long day at work, none of which helped.
But there were good times, too. For all the time he learned to swim, he looked at it as something of a passion, and faced it head-on. He was so consumed by it that one colleague even caught him working on his ‘strokes’(they weren’t called ‘boats’, like he had originally thought) in the bathroom. Admittedly, it wasn’t the best place to be practicing those.
But it was worth mentioning that in all his 23 years, he had never been quite so occupied with anything. And so he worked hard at it, too. He tried to be at the pool even after the usual timings. He would sometimes practice for hours at a stretch, and usually the cleaners had to put up quite a fight asking him to get out. There was a rumor going around among the cleaners that he had once befriended a cleaner by offering to pay with his son’s school fees, and this was why he could come and go as he pleased. (He had actually only done the normal thing and talked to the guy in charge of the keys.)
And for all the effort that he put in, he got better. Stroke by stroke, minute by minute, day by day. In fact, that first time after he had gotten out, he went in once more and just stood there, taller than everybody else, assessing the water.
Initially he spent a lot of his time trying to not float away. The next time he went in, he could beat that boy Anvesh. But with Anvesh he was just testing the waters, checking the competition. Now, however, he set his sights high and targeted the fastest of them all, Zia.
By the fourth week, he had beaten Zia, too. At the same time, he reminded himself not to let it get to his head. He wouldn’t let it disillusion him into thinking he was the best swimmer in the world, however tempting and logical that was. He would work with his head down, and give himself only a break after the 10-week target that he had set for himself.
What he had not anticipated, however, that these 10 weeks would prove to be a life changing event. He had learned to persevere, to keep on hustling no matter what. Now he could move on to greater heights. Maybe to larger pools even?
But for now, he was proud to have conquered.. the Kiddie Pool.!
Source : my own blog at mariamsafoora.wordpress.com
