Summer time blues

While almost everyone has happy memories of summer about the wonderful time they had swimming in the neighbourhood pond to beat the heat, mine are quite dramatic, as I nearly drowned and would have become a statistic.

Summertime in my hometown in south India was usually deadly boring as there was absolutely nothing to do; not even a summer camp to go to, such as in Dubai where hapless Indian children are sent to take up 'extra coaching classes'.

You see these adverts in the local dailies: 'Don't know what to do with your kids while you are at work this summer? Send them to summer camp. We provide the best maths coaching classes. Is your child unable to cope with the stress of homework, send him to our academy for the summer. We will set him right."

Since we had no summer camps, we wandered around the rocky hills in the neighbourhood shooting chameleons, other tiny reptiles and pretty birds with our air guns and as the sun became an orange ball, we sat and dangled our scrawny legs over the high rocky ledges and watched it quietly disappear.

One day a child came back from the US for the summer and he started boasting about how he and his co-ed class mates went skinny-dipping and none of us knew what he was talking about.

We studied at a boys only school and when we finally enrolled in college, the class was full of girls and we didn't know how to handle that, and neither did the girls, but that's another story.

I asked him instead what caviar tasted like, as I genuinely wanted to know after reading about it in an extremely tasteless James Hadley Chase crime thriller, so he got bored of us and went home and I never saw him again.

One summer, we discovered this great pool near the military barracks. It was run by the local municipality and the water was moss green and there was no lifeguard.

I hung around in the shallow end and every time my foot slipped on the murky tiles, I had a bad moment, blindly flailing and spluttering.

One day a municipal official came to the pool to swim and he had swarms of people around him, scraping and bowing, carrying the towel for him and placing a foldable chair at the edge of the pool for him to rest. After he left, the lifeguard also disappeared for the rest of the summer.

They say your life flashes before your eyes in your final moments. But since I was a child, my brain had not downloaded many interesting events and all I could remember was that one day I slipped and went into the deep end, and I was alone in the pool. I will spare you the gory details but the fear of water from that day onwards has been intense.

Years later I fought my personal demons and learned swimming when I decided to go to Haj and look for work in Saudi Arabia.

The reason I wanted to learn swimming was I had heard about the condition of the merchant vessels that carried pilgrims to the holy places.

"Haj mabroor," said a kindly man with a long, white flowing beard, handing me a snack box as I climbed on board the ship at Mumbai. The moment I stepped on board I fell sea sick and a nurse came regularly to my cabin, bracing herself as the ship rolled from side-to-side, to give me anti-nausea pills.

One day the constant thud-thud of the ship's engines went silent, which was quite unnerving. The captain announced there was nothing to worry about as we silently floated.

I was peering down the side of the ship into the deep waters wondering how it was like to swim in the sea, when somebody said there are sharks in the Arabian Gulf.