By Sanuj Srivastava on SwimSwam
In Part 3, I shared how a coach from Bengal, Rakesh Mondal, noticed me during a beginners’ race and asked me a question I had never expected: “Why don’t you prepare for competitions?” Until that moment, swimming was simply something I enjoyed doing. I had only recently overcome my fear of deep water, and I had absolutely no idea that competitive swimming could become a part of my life. But now that question had created a new fear, what if I actually had to train like those competitive swimmers I had been watching from a distance?
That day, I didn’t really want to go to the pool. I was worried that if I started competitive training, I would have to swim for hours, do extremely hard workouts, and somehow survive the kind of training I had seen Rakesh Mondal give to the competitive swimmers. At that time, my elder brother had also recently started learning swimming. It had only been four or five days since he joined, and because he was going to the pool, I had no choice but to go along with him.
The moment I reached the pool, the first thing I did was look around to see whether the Rakesh Mondal Sir was there. I couldn’t see him anywhere, and I immediately felt relieved. I thought I had escaped. So I went back to my usual routine, swimming, playing around and enjoying my time in the pool like I always did. I had almost convinced myself that the day was going to pass normally.
Then, just when the batch was about to finish, I heard the whistle.
I looked toward the sound and saw Rakesh Mondal.
My entire mood changed. I immediately started looking for a place where I could somehow disappear until the session ended. I didn’t want him to see me. I was hoping that if I stayed quiet enough, the pool session would finish and I could simply go home. For a while, I thought my plan had worked. But when the batch ended, he stopped me.
“So, what have you decided? You’re going to do competitive swimming, right?”
I immediately said no.
He then called my elder brother and asked him, “Do you want to make him a swimmer?”
My brother simply replied, “Yes. Give him the training.”
That one answer changed everything.
The coach told my brother that he could leave, and I started walking with him, thinking I was going home too. But before I could get away, the coach stopped me.
“You stay.”
My face immediately changed. I felt like I was about to cry. I had watched him train competitive swimmers, and I knew how strict he could be. I didn’t have the courage to tell him that I didn’t want to train or that I wanted to go home. My brother left, and suddenly I was standing there alone with the coach.
He told me to change into my swimming costume.
A few minutes later, I came back to the pool. There was nobody else around. The pool was almost completely empty, and it was just me and the two coaches. I remember looking at the water and realizing that this was very different from my usual swimming sessions.
The coach told me to get into the water.
I jumped in and immediately grabbed the wall.
He told me to let go.
I hesitated and said, “Sir, I can let go if I have a floater. Without a floater, I’ll sink.”
That was when he taught me something I had never properly understood before, how to position my body and use my movements to stay on the surface of the water.
For the first time in my life, I tried water treading without holding on to anything.
I managed to stay up for maybe five or seven seconds before getting tired and grabbing the wall again. It wasn’t much, but it was something I had never been able to do before. The coach simply told me, “You’ll get it. Practice it every day.”
Then he asked me to swim.
I started swimming across the width of the pool. When I reached the other side, I stopped, expecting the session to be over.
The coach looked at me and gestured, asking why I had stopped.
“I’m tired, sir,” I replied.
His voice immediately became louder.
“Come back.”
I was scared enough that I started swimming again without arguing. But my endurance was terrible. My arms and legs were burning, and somewhere in the middle of the pool I swallowed a huge amount of water. I was exhausted by the time I reached the other side.
The coach looked at me and told me that I had almost no endurance. From now on, I would have to swim at least four laps every day.
Four laps.
At that moment, even the number four sounded frightening to me.
Until then, I had considered swimming across the pool once without stopping a big achievement. Now someone was telling me that I needed to do four laps every day just to build basic endurance.
After that, he checked the other strokes I knew. I could do a little bit of them, although my technique was far from good. I had learned most of my swimming simply by watching others and experimenting on my own.
After observing me, he finally said something that made my heart sink.
“From tomorrow, you’ll train with the competitive swimmers.”
And just like that, he left me there.
I stayed in the pool for a little while longer, practicing water treading and trying to understand what had just happened. A few hours earlier, I had been happily swimming in my usual beginner routine. Now I had been told that from the very next day, I would be training with competitive swimmers.
I eventually went home. It was around 7:30 in the evening, and I was still trying to process everything that had happened.
At that point, I had no idea how important that evening would become in my life. I thought I was simply starting a difficult new phase of swimming. I didn’t know that the coach who had just changed the direction of my swimming would disappear from my life almost as quickly as he had entered it.
I had no idea that this would be the last time I would ever meet Rakesh Mondal.
And I certainly had no idea that the decision he made that evening would eventually lead me far beyond the swimming pool I knew at that time.
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