The Deep End

There were two swimming pools at Sunrise Aquatic Centre, and as far as anyone knew, Riya Menon owned both of them.

The training pool — four feet deep, end to end — was where the batch did laps, and in the training pool Riya was untouchable. Fastest freestyle in the under-13s. Cleanest turns. Coach Nair used her stroke as the demonstration stroke. When the others raced her, they were really racing for second.

The main pool was the one with the deep end. Twelve feet, under the far blocks. And in fourteen months of training, through a rotation of excuses so well-managed it should have earned separate marks — ear trouble, a convenient cramp, a forgotten cap, twice a strategically upset stomach — Riya had never once swum in it.

Because here was the thing she had told no one, and had organised her entire swimming life around not telling: the moment Riya couldn’t feel the bottom under her, something in her chest closed like a fist.

It made no sense, and she knew it made no sense — that was the worst part. She could swim. Her body did not know the difference between four feet and twelve; her stroke was her stroke. But her mind knew, the second the floor tilted away into that deep blue-nothing, and her breath went shallow and her arms forgot their training and she had learned, at age nine, in one bad flailing minute she’d passed off as a joke, that she would apparently rather build a fourteen-month fortress of excuses than feel that again.

The fortress fell on a Tuesday. Coach Nair posted the list for the inter-club meet, and Riya’s name was at the top, and the meet was at Nehru Pool.

Nehru Pool had no shallow lanes.

She thought about the stomach excuse. She thought about the ear. She lay awake doing what she now privately called the accounting — the running tally of what the secret cost per week to maintain, in planning and dodging and almost-getting-caught — and somewhere after midnight the accounting turned up a result she hadn’t expected: the fear of the deep end was actually the second heaviest thing she carried. The heaviest was the hiding.

Everyone thought she was the bravest swimmer in the batch. Every single day, she got up and performed that person. You can be terrified of one end of a pool, it turns out, and exhausted by the whole thing.

Wednesday, she came to training forty minutes early, when it was just Coach Nair and the cleaning nets. She stood at the edge of the main pool, at the deep end, toes curled over the tiles, heart going like a fast set — and said the eleven words she’d been rehearsing since midnight, out loud, to an adult, for the first time:

“I’m scared of deep water. I’ve been hiding it from you.”

Coach Nair did not laugh. He did not say but you’re my best swimmer, which she’d dreaded, or there’s nothing to be scared of, which would have been worse, because there she was, scared, being told the thing didn’t exist.

He looked at the water. “Fourteen months,” he said, doing his own accounting. “The ear infections. The cramp at districts.” He shook his head slowly — not angry; something more like respect for the sheer effort. “You know what I coach, Riya? I don’t coach fearless. Fearless drowns, eventually, somewhere, showing off. I coach scared-and-swimming. That I can work with. But only if I know.”

What followed was not a montage, and Riya wanted it remembered that way. It was three weeks of small, specific, unglamorous work. Treading water at the rope where deep began, one hand on, then one finger on, then hovering. Learning that the fist in her chest loosened if she exhaled longer than she inhaled. Floating on her back over the deep — “the water doesn’t check the depth before holding you up,” Coach said, “that part’s just physics” — while her mind screamed for the first four days and merely muttered by the sixth. Swimming one width, then one length, always with Coach walking the pool edge beside her, until the morning he silently didn’t.

At the meet, on the blocks at Nehru Pool, Riya looked down twelve feet of blue and felt the fist form in her chest, right on schedule.

There you are, she thought. Fine. Come along, then.

She didn’t win. Third, in the end, two body-lengths behind a tall girl from Pune — and it did not matter even slightly, or rather it mattered in a completely different currency: she had raced the whole length of water with nothing under her feet, scared at the start and scared at the turn and less scared at the wall, and every metre of it had been in the open, with her name announced, with no fortress anywhere.

Her batch cheered like she’d taken gold. They didn’t know the half of it.

Coach Nair knew. At the bus he handed her the participation sheet to sign and said, not quite looking at her, in the tone he used for stroke corrections:

“Bravest swimmer in the batch. Now it’s even true.”