Breaking the surface calm

In fiction, swimming pools lend themselves to metaphors about the unknown depths of known spaces — how families, or the accepted status quo, can have undercurrents of darkness. The artificiality of a swimming pool gives this metaphor its heft — the fantasy that within the walls of a pool, the water is totally in our control. In her essay collection The White Album, Joan Didion writes that a pool is a symbol “of order, of control over the uncontrollable.” I’m drawn to stories in which the image of the pool is used to emphasise a feeling of being adrift — that, despite known boundaries, we are still learning to tread water.

Bhavika Govil makes use of this metaphor in her moving and assured debut novel, Hot Water. We meet a close-knit family of three — single mother Ma, 14-year-old Ashu, and nine-year-old Mira. Across one summer, everything will change: secrets will be carefully kept and unexpectedly revealed; bonds will be tested, and some of them will break. Told in three perspectives, each character becomes sharper and more three-dimensional as we see them through each other’s eyes, the playground for Govil to explore the hundreds of ways in which a family can hide parts of themselves from each other, whether wilfully or not. But the summer begins innocently enough, with a trip to the swimming pool. Mira, distracted by a passing bee, swims lower and lower into the deep end, until she has to be pulled to the surface, gasping for air. The family in Hot Water likewise find themselves navigating through the deep — signalled in the book’s section breaks, which are named things like ‘plunge,’ ‘swim,’ ‘sink,’ ‘flail’ — until they must finally break the surface, remembering how to breathe.

Whenever I encounter a swimming metaphor in a book, I think of John Cheever’s short story, The Swimmer, first published in 1964. A wealthy man in suburban New York, at a friend’s house, decides to make his way back home by swimming across the pools of his neighbours. As his journey progresses, the joviality and decadence that he began with are slowly overtaken by something sinister and more uneasy — seasons seem to be changing at an alarming rate; his neighbours bring up things he does not remember happening. The Swimmer unfolds over one day and across several years simultaneously. The bright summer day and the cool swimming pool are deceptive; they hide in their depths all the anxieties and insecurities of 1960s suburban America.

Cheever’s The Swimmer might have influenced Emma Cline’s novel The Guest, in which a young woman, Alex, finds herself alone in Long Island. Kicked out of the house of the man she’s seeing, instead of going home, she drifts from party to party, house to house, and pool to pool, modifying her personality and her history to suit the crowd. An outsider in every sense, Alex is looking for a foothold, a means of survival, while the people she meets live in a financial sphere far removed from her own. While little happens by way of plot, the tension builds slowly across The Guest till its very last page, as Alex wanders ever closer to dangerous situations. And across its pages, infinity pools glisten, stretching out endlessly towards the horizon.

The Swimmer, The Guest, and Hot Water all belong to different genres — surrealism, thriller, family drama — but the swimming pool unites them all. It only takes a stone’s throw for ripples to break the calm, clear illusion of order. All these characters submerge themselves in the pool’s water, and none of them emerge the same.

The author is a writer and illustrator.

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.