For a guy with an unhealthy fascination with islands, it is a bit of a mystery that I never learned to swim. I have lived with a pool in my backyard for 24 years. Many kids have learned to swim in them. Friends have done laps in them. I guess I was too busy making cocktails and serving around to figure out how to stay afloat in water.

Every year, Sharmila and I solemnly resolve that we are going to learn to swim. We have managed to keep many things in our lives afloat – our marriage, our finances, our general sanity – but our actual heads in actual water are not among them.

Then, out of nowhere, Sharmila announced that she had signed me up for swimming lessons! Gulp!!

And so there I was at a swimming school, getting formally re-introduced to the concept of a pool.

The first day’s assignment was simple: float on my back. That’s it. Just… exist horizontally in water, which, I am told, most humans can do instinctively. My teachers – and there were several, suggesting they had received advance intelligence about this particular student – were fairly surprised at my initial performance. Apparently, no other student had failed all 25 attempts you made them go through on the first day.

Towards the end, they had become more sympathetic than instructive. One young teacher concluded, just before we got out of the water, that I had a lot of muscles. That is why, apparently, I was finding it difficult to stay afloat.

Yeah, right! I did not have the heart to tell him that Sharmila has also signed me up to the Weight Watchers’ Club!