Language in “Swimming Lessons”
The language in “Swimming Lessons” has a multi-layered structure, with many voices
resonating through the text. It also has a psychological parameter to it, wherein language
points to the inner voice of the narrator/protagonist.
At yet another level the language in this text is also very imaginative. The first person
narrator in “Swimming Lessons” uses his lively imagination and “with its help he travels
back and forth from childhood and adolescence to the mature years.” 61 The inner void in the
narrator is compensated in the narrator through the many characters and their voices
reverberating through the narrative.
In it structure, the language is circular in nature with stories wrapped around stories as we
peel off each to reach the core. The character also evolves through the text as he seems to be
on a journey which connects him back to his roots as much as it is a psychological journey
leading him “from one point of awareness to another.” 62 At the same time, there seems to be
a release of his psychological void through the language which oscillates between his
original homeland (Bombay, India) and the country to which he has migrated (Canada),
shifting as it were between then and now. The use of a language structure which is rich and
complex enables us to perceive the two-world perspective which the narrator and through
him the author offers to the readers.
Language, must also be understood as a social phenomena since it is the very medium that
binds people, communities within a given society or across the world. Here too, we can
visibly see it as giving us a diverse view of the character’s life in Canada and India. It is his
medium of communicating with his parents through their letters written to each other and his
means of communicating and surviving in an alien land.
The stories within the text are often “evocatively told in all of three short sentences.” 63 Here
too we must give credit to Mistry in his magnificent art of story-telling, where each story
holds up as a mirror to a lived, experienced event narrated in short, terse sentences yet
expressed in an evocative language that makes the reader believe it to have happened in a
given spatio-temporal frame, with complete veracity. Mistry also uses language to render a
sociological representation of the plight of the Parsi community, a point that was discussed at
the very beginning while considering Mistry as a diasporic writer, particularly in the footnote
with Nilufer E. Bharucha’s tracing of the historical origins of the Parsi community before it
settled in India.
Other than these functions of language in “Swimming Lessons”, the text has a charm with its
colloquial rhythms and its conversational quality which make the entire story and the stories
within it give the semblance of a real, lived experience even when narrated. This
conversational appeal of the text also merges it with the consciousness of the narrator and
very naturally to that of the author, considering that we see the commonalities at many levels
between the two. Here too, language fluctuates between conversation and narration, even
italicized in the letters exchanged between the narrator and his parents. Besides this,
language moves back and forth in time, traversing time zones and geographical spaces to
give a wide panorama to the reader. The narrator’s inner desires also get articulated through
the medium of language in the text.
Thus, it would be worth considering that language holds a mirror to the narrator’s life as
much as to the many characters whose lives are entwined with the narrator, both in his past
and present. Language is clearly the narrator’s (and author’s) moment of creating an identity
for himself as a Parsi immigrant in Canada while simultaneously being a creatively
exhilarating moment for them both in their process of becoming a writer.