The cerebral approach worked on all of my father’s swimming students, most of whom, not coincidentally, grew up to be engineers. I, however, needed something else. I’ve never been interested in why exactly an airplane can fly; I want to know if the pilot has had enough sleep. In learning to swim, I just wanted to know that I wasn’t going to die. My father, however, never quite understood the role of anxiety in my fruitless swimming lessons. He eventually decided that perhaps if he yelled or hurled insults, I might learn more quickly. “You’re like a rock! You’re hopeless! What’s wrong with you?” This method may work wonders in the army, but it didn’t work with me. I now had two hurdles to overcome, fear of water and fear of being in the water with my father.

After a couple summers’ worth of lessons, I had managed, by age six, to learn nothing, setting an all-time failure record for my father. In hindsight, I believe my ability to dodge all learning opportunities did reveal a certain inner strength, a persistent refusal to be like the others. But the British never appreciated Gandhi’s persistence, and my family didn’t appreciate mine.

My father eventually decided that we didn’t actually have to be in a pool for him to get angry with me for not knowing how to swim. He started to have a somewhat Pavlovian reaction toward me. If anybody used the word “swim,” my father would glare at me with a combination of shame and anger, a look that said, “I wish I had kept the receipt.” To save face, he had come up with a theory of why I couldn’t swim. “She’s built like a rock,” he’d always say. “She just sinks.” This wasn’t entirely true. I had never actually let go of my father in the pool, preferring instead to cling to him like a koala on a eucalyptus branch during an earthquake. His determination to peel me off himself matched, but did not exceed, my determination to hold on to him.

Sadly enough, my father stopped talking altogether about his glorious swimming lessons. He knew that no impressive tale could match his one big failure, moi. He finally announced to the world, which for us consisted of my aunts, uncles, and cousins, that some people are incapable of swimming. “Firoozeh is one of them,” he concluded.