“Can you help me lift my legs,” says a Sikh woman in her 70s, who’s determined to keep her face above the water. She is preparing to swim her first length of the local swimming pool. “Yes, auntie,” I say, and dutifully place my hands under her, and suddenly, she is buoyant. In her leopard-print costume and with bangles skimming the water, she launches into a determined breaststroke, with her neck arched to the beams. She stops halfway down the lane, just before her feet no longer touch the bottom.
It’s hard to describe just how big a milestone this is for her – and for me. I’ve been teaching her to swim for six weeks, and just a few classes ago, she was terrified of getting wet, let alone being seen in leopard print and swimming lengths. Now, her confidence is unrecognisable. She is one of many south Asian women I teach who never learned to swim as a child, and who is now reckoning with their inherited view of leisure, tightly bound in cultural and gendered restrictions.
