Chapter 23: The Gym at Night

Seaside Fitness closes at ten, but on the last Friday of every month, they keep the pool open until midnight for members who book in advance. Vandana calls it "Moonlight Swim" and has been trying to get me into the pool since: January.

I've resisted. The resistance being: not about swimming (I can swim; I learned in Lucknow at the university pool where Harsh taught me during our courtship, the courtship that I now understand was: an audition for the role of wife, each lesson a scene in which I demonstrated: willingness to learn, willingness to be taught, willingness to be: shaped). The resistance is about: the swimsuit. The swimsuit that requires me to be: visible. My body, visible. In water, in light, in the company of people who will see me in a state of: undress that I haven't permitted since the marriage ended.

But it's August. Seven months in Mumbai. Seven months of yoga and Zumba and spinning and walking and the gradual, gruelling reclamation of a body that I'd treated as: furniture. Something functional. Something that occupied space without occupying: attention. Seven months of Sunaina saying "your body is: a practice" and Jaya saying "your body is: yours" and Cheryl saying "your body survived Doug dying and it's still here and that makes it: extraordinary."

So I buy a swimsuit. Not the swimsuit that Vandana recommends (a bikini, because "you have the body, Mar, you just don't know it"), not the swimsuit that I would have bought in Lucknow (a full-coverage salwar-style swim dress that covers everything from neck to knee and that exists for the purpose of: invisibility). A one-piece. Navy blue. Simple. The swimsuit of a woman who is: present but not performing. Visible but not: displayed.

The pool at midnight is: a different creature from the pool at noon. At noon, the pool is: exercise. Lanes, caps, goggles, the mechanical back-and-forth of people swimming for fitness. At midnight, the pool is: ceremony. The overhead lights are dimmed. The water is: illuminated from below — blue-green, the colour that water becomes when light hits it from underneath, the colour of: another world. The colour that makes you feel like you're entering: something, not just swimming in something.

Vandana is already in the water. She's wearing the bikini she recommended for me — teal, naturally — and she looks: magnificent. Not in the magazine way (Vandana doesn't have a magazine body; she has a Vandana body, which is: better, because a Vandana body is a body that has lived and laughed and eaten vada pav and been married three times and survived all of it). She waves from the shallow end.

"Get in! The water's perfect!"

The water is: not perfect. The water is twenty-six degrees, which is: cold enough to make your body protest when you first enter and warm enough to forgive you after thirty seconds. I descend the ladder. The chrome is cool under my hands — the cool of metal in humidity, the cool that says: hold on, this is the transition, the transition from air to water, from dry to wet, from: visible to submerged.

My feet find the bottom. The tiles are smooth — the smooth of surfaces designed for bare feet, surfaces that have been walked on by hundreds of bodies and that retain: nothing. No footprints. No memory. Just: smooth, clean, anonymous surface.

I sink.

Not dramatically — I don't plunge or dive. I lower myself until the water reaches my chest, then my shoulders, then my neck, and then I'm: in. In the water. In the blue-green light. In the midnight pool at Seaside Fitness with Vandana waving from three metres away and the sound of my own breathing amplified by the water's proximity to my ears.

And the thing about water — the thing that nobody told me, the thing that Sunaina probably knows but that you have to discover yourself — is that water holds you. Not metaphorically. Physically. The buoyancy that physics describes as "the upward force exerted by a fluid" is, when experienced by a fifty-year-old woman who has been: carrying things for twenty-seven years, not a force but: a release. The water says: I've got you. You can stop holding yourself up. I'll do it.

I float. On my back. Looking up at the ceiling of Seaside Fitness, which at midnight with the lights dimmed looks like: a sky. Not the Mumbai sky (the Mumbai sky is: obscured by light pollution and ambition and buildings that block the stars). A private sky. A ceiling-sky. The sky of a room that is: mine, ours, the shared space of women in water at midnight.

Jaya arrives. She enters the water without ceremony — the way Jaya does everything, with directness and zero performativity. She's wearing a black one-piece that's been worn a hundred times and that she hasn't replaced because replacing functional things is: Jaya's version of wasteful.

Cheryl arrives. In a swimsuit that Doug bought her in Goa — "the last holiday, the one before the heart attack, the one where we ate fish curry every night and swam every morning and he said 'Cheryl, promise me we'll always live near water' and I promised and I kept the promise and the swimsuit."

Aditi arrives last. Running — she's always running, Aditi, running from meetings to gym to therapy to the life she's building at twenty-eight with the urgency of someone who knows that the years go fast because she's watched: us. She cannonballs into the pool. The splash is: enormous, inappropriate, joyful. The splash of a twenty-eight-year-old who has not yet learned that some occasions call for dignity instead of: impact. The splash drenches Vandana, who screams, and Jaya, who doesn't flinch, and me, who laughs.

We swim. Not laps — that would be: exercise, and this is not exercise. This is: five women in water at midnight, moving through the blue-green light with the particular grace that water gives to bodies that land doesn't. In water, you are: lighter. In water, your joints don't ache and your shoulders don't carry and your hips — Sunaina's filing cabinets — don't store. In water, you are: released.

"I used to swim with Doug," Cheryl says. She's floating on her back, her eyes closed, the Hawaiian shirt (not worn in the pool, obviously, but: present, folded on a chair by the pool edge, present the way Doug is always present). "In Goa. In the ocean. We'd swim out past the waves and float. And he'd say: 'This is it, Cheryl. This is the point. The floating.' He meant: the floating is the point of everything. Not the swimming — the floating. Not the effort — the rest."

"Doug was wise," Vandana says.

"Doug ate a kilo of jalebi on a dare. Wise is: selective with him."

We laugh. The laughter that five women produce in a midnight pool — the laughter that echoes off the tiled walls and the water's surface and the ceiling-sky and that returns to us: amplified. The amplification of shared joy. The acoustics of: belonging.

After the swim, we sit on the pool edge. Feet in the water. The water now warm from our bodies — the water that we've warmed by being in it, the reciprocity of: you hold me, I warm you. Our legs dangle. Our toes make circles in the surface.

"We should do this every month," Aditi says.

"We will," Vandana says.

"Promise?"

"Promise. Last Friday. Midnight swim. Forever."

Forever. The word that young people use and that old people have learned to: distrust. But tonight, sitting on the edge of a pool at midnight in Bandra, with my feet in warm water and my friends beside me and the blue-green light making everything look: gentle — tonight, forever feels: possible.

"Forever," I say.

And I mean it. Even though I know better. Even though twenty-seven years of "forever" taught me that forever is: a lie. Even though — because — the lie is: beautiful. And some lies deserve to be: believed.