In the following essay, Piedmont-Marton compares and contrasts the two-halves of the "split screen" of "Swimming Lessons," Toronto and Bombay, and the narrator's perception of events in his life with reality.

In "Swimming Lessons" a young Indian immigrant, Kersi, describes his daily life in an apartment building in Toronto. Woven into his narrative, however, are imagined scenes from his parent's apartment in Bombay. The story is constructed like a split screen, with the narrator's life and story telling on one side, and his parents ten thousand miles away reading his letters and stories and commenting on them. The swimming lessons that the narrator signs up for are also a metaphor for his attempts to negotiate the foreign waters of his adopted country.

The story opens in media res, or in the middle of things. The narrator, whose name is not revealed but is recognizable from the preceding...