"Swimming Lessons" is the last story in the collection of short fiction that first brought Rohinton Mistry national attention in Canada and subsequently the United States. The set of eleven stories titled Tales from Firozsha Baag [retitled Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag when it was published in 1989 in the United States] was well received by critics in both countries. As "Swimming Lessons" is positioned as the last story in the collection, it has prompted many reviewers to give it particular attention.
An important feature of the story is that its setting moves with the narrator from Bombay to Toronto and allows Mistry to draw deft parallels between the lives of the residents of apartment complexes in both of these crowded, multicultural urban settings. It also gives him an opportunity to explore the writer's uses of memory and events of his past life using the commentary of the narrator's parents, who discuss the manuscript he sends them after living several years in Toronto. While the other stories in the collection focus on the lives, foibles, and crises of the Parsi community in the Bombay housing complex called Firozsha Baag, "Swimming Lessons" shifts the focus to issues of the loneliness, racism, and cultural adjustment of Mistry's Indian immigrant protagonist, a not so thinly veiled autobiographical character. While the two settings are literally worlds apart, the characters of "Swimming Lessons" in the end seem almost comfortably similar to their Indian counterparts in their sad, petty, and often humorous attempts to find dignity and human connection in the isolating circumstances of modern urban apartment living.
This complete Introduction contains 265 words. This
study guide contains 24,723 words (approx. 82 pages at 300
words per page).
