When I feel most invisible, I turn to YouTube and watch videos of freediving. I became enthralled when I was researching the motions and rhythms of being proficiently underwater for a scene in my novel about my parents.
I’d been watching videos of Esther Williams’ synchronized swimming in 1940s aqua musicals and came across other swimming pool videos, which led me down a rabbit hole of clips of locals diving in Bali and Puerto Rico, floating effortlessly over corals and anemones without equipment, breaking the surface like dolphins and piking downward to explore the sea again.
I saw a Bajau fisherman slip into the water with a single breath and a spear gun and descend twenty meters to hunt on the seabed, emerging minutes later. One video led to another, and soon I came across people who weren’t just reef-diving without equipment but free diving as sport.
There seems to be a kind of religious experience in all of it, whether you are spearfishing on the sea floor in giant steps, negatively buoyant, or descending into blue-black nothingness in a face-down drift. World-class free divers have highly specific in-the-moment feelings about it. Immortal peace, according to one. He said it forced him to live entirely in the moment.
When I started surfing YouTube in search of swimming videos, I was trying to imbue my protagonist (a version of my mother) with an emotional buoyancy, so I made her a gifted swimmer. In those blue moments, she’d be briefly fulfilled. The muscular romance of her body stitching the surface of the water would entice readers to look beyond her ragged edges and into the beautiful hurricane of her personality.
When I feel most invisible, I turn to YouTube and watch videos of freediving.
But I didn’t realize how depleted I felt, swimming for years in this story of an American fair-skinned woman who closely resembled my mother and who had so little to ground her emotionally. She didn’t belong in India.
O’d spent my whole life, since immigrating from India, feeling invisible in a shiny new country that seemed not to care much about me. Half a lifetime later, I still feel invisible so relentlessly that I think I have no choice but to embrace this invisibility as the real me.
I chose to give my character a proficiency that evoked admiration in public, and which made her, and by extension me, noticeable and worth loving. She—we—would be in love with who we were, from the inside of our heads to the outside of our bodies. So here I was, watching divers chasing a record—or something less definitive.
It was enthralling to slip out of my armchair and dive into an abyss. When you are thirty meters down, no longer buoyant, you put your arms down and drift. Signals in the body tell the blood where to go and the heart valves how to act.
The body engages its reflexive longing to be amphibian; it recognizes the ambient underwater sounds that to our ears are always the same season; you hear the harmonics of submersive exhalations. Down in the amniotic dark, where antique water pulses, you can hold your breath for a record-breaking eleven and a half minutes or for nine ordinary months. You are a champion of extreme depths. It is where life is most isolated and profound.
A century ago, scientists thought that if you descended one hundred feet into the ocean, the pressure would kill you. They believed in the logic of Boyle’s law, an equation formulated in 1660 that hypothesized how gases behave. Water is denser than air, Boyle’s law states, so as pressure increases as you descend, your lungs would shrink and this would kill you.
We all have utilitarian gospels, sometimes grounded in science, that we transpose as religious, but the scientific method is only a systematic way of testing hypotheses until the same results repeat enough that you believe them to be true. Am I invisible? Ideas in science are uncertain until they are proven to be true, and they stay true until they are disproven.
As you descend, your heart slows to conserve oxygen and your spleen contracts. But, it turns out, the body adapts: when you reach the zone where your lungs shrink (because they are no longer filled with air) your blood vessels reflexively rush to your lungs so they do not collapse, and swell to fill the cavity.
Without air, your body loses its buoyancy and you sink. Carbon dioxide and nitrogen increase in your bloodstream, and slowly you slip into a semi-dream state—all while in freefall. There are certain emotional truths about resilience that unscientifically have proven to me that pressure does not destroy you but instead gives you clarity.
*
My feeling of being whole began fading when I left India at age seven. The country is a color wheel of brown, and I faded in properly. The day before we left, our extended family gathered in the gray concrete courtyard of my grandparents’ apartment in Sion, a suburb about ten kilometers north of our Cumballa Hill home in Bombay, and took black-and-white photographs.
No one smiled in the photographs except my mother, who was American. It was not because we were all unhappy but because we were Indian. Sitting for photos was a serious thing. You were documenting a moment of importance, establishing yourself as a person of status, making a record to contribute to your lifetime-timeline of family events.
We create rituals for everything we do, which is another way of documenting the passing of time. Everyone had a turn in the steamy courtyard, waiting at length to be called and then organized in relation to whom they belonged. First, our grandparents, Ba and Bapuji, with their six children. Then the entire family: the youngest children sat in the front row, older cousins stood behind us, and behind in the last row were our parents, with Ba and Bapuji at the center.
All the brothers and the one sister look almost identical, with pronounced, sleek cheekbones and hair oiled into fine curves around their brows. I always thought that my father was the most beautiful of all his siblings: cheeks bright as apples, eyes quick to see what others didn’t. After a time, my parents, my sister, and I were called. This went on all day, in various combinations. It was proof that as a child, at least in India, I was not invisible.
I possessed picture-perfect status as an individual in a traditional family: a female descendant of Gujarati merchants, a rabbi born in Minsk, a couple from Poland, and an umbrella salesman and a seamstress from Tarnov, Austria. I was one in a dozen cousins and a niece of many; I was a student at the well-to-do Cathedral—an Anglican private school where I learned embroidery and Hindi.
I lived in a country at latitude 19 degrees north and longitude 72 degrees east on the surface of Earth. I was a girl with opportunities because my father worked for a German company so his wages were generous. I was a passive participant of rituals in a minority religion that largely exists outside the Hindu-Muslim religious conflicts that have bloodied the history of Indian culture and that, seventy-eight years after Partition, continue to fuel mob lynchings.
To whom does the idea of India belong? To which country do I belong? I do not belong to Germany, where I was born and lived, as an infant, for five months. India shaped my sense of myself and gave me a childhood full of other children.
It gave me Amar Chitra comic books, which vividly illustrated the violent and provocative tales of the epic Mahabharata, and invited me to partake in the colorful frenzy of powder-throwing during Holi, the parade of Ganesh effigies heading to the sea on men’s shoulders during Ganesh Chaturthi, my family’s solemn Jain rituals and chanting, and monsoon rains that flung down cascades and battered hot pavements.
Something faded, figuratively, from those photographs later. Perhaps my sense of myself as Indian diffused without the smells of salt air, diesel, betel nut, cotton, and roasted cumin, and without the Ferris wheel of family and social events—but the girl I was then disappeared into the shag-carpet, two-story home with a dungeon-like basement full of ghosts and murderers on Woodcrest Drive in New Providence, New Jersey.
During high school, I worked at a drugstore that stocked outdated, dusty boxes of condoms and Lancôme makeup that I sold to girls who were prettier than me. I was a disaffected teenager and obsessively ate the chocolate bars on the shelves across from the cash register to satisfy my directionless cravings and my inner rage that I did not have a CoverGirl face and I did not look like everyone else in the small Catholic town we had moved to.
Next door to the drugstore, the supermarket had wonderful polygonal metal cages, with an invisible top, on wheels. My sister and I filled it up with Frosted Flakes and Fruit Roll-Ups. We wandered like queens among packaged food, fresh peaches, and melons.
I was invisible in the sprawling aisles of the supermarket unless I stood in line at the deli counter and pretended to transfigure into a number waiting to be noticed, and for my numerical identity to be yelled out and given human form.
My parents gave me a new identity in the canary yellow cage that was my room, with its sateen floral bedspread and gold-detailed white princess desk and cabinet set and a goldfish that swam circles in its own cage. My mother told me I was Jewish and instructed me that from then on I would attend Sunday school at Temple Sinai in Summit, one town over.
Perplexed and irritated that I had to give up a weekend morning, I complied and I got myself a minimalist Jewish education, ignoring the teachings about history and God and enjoying the social interactions with boys who, unlike my peers at school, didn’t shun me for being Jewish and Indian—and who showed me how to get high. I loved the Purim carnival, especially the cacophony that transformed the gym when someone yelled out the name of villainous Haman.
But more importantly, there were concession prizes for everything. No one ever walked away a loser at Temple Sinai.
During long high holiday services, I counted red hats to stave away the boredom, even when Rabbi Biel (whose sermons my mother loved) was talking. We were part of the community because we were Jewish, but we were not part of the community of our street.
To most people, I had the wrong color skin and the wrong religion.
It bothers me now that the synagogue welcomed us not out of love but because our mother was Jewish. But back then, I was grateful to be welcomed in. To most people, I had the wrong color skin and the wrong religion. They thought I was ugly and I believed them.
Kids at school called me names: jungle bunny, spear chucker, kike, nigger. I shrugged off the minor insults from jerks and jokesters who said “ooga booga” or—with their hands cartoonishly tapping their mouths—made vulgar imitations of ululating Native American war cries in my face.
I saw some relevance, even excitement, in the idea of being a tribal runner. I was proud of being a sprinter, faster than the fastest and most popular boy, Barry Blackwell, who I’d shamelessly beat in the final heat of a race for the annual Presidential Fitness Awards, a national competition. I was fleet, a characteristic in those first two insults that suited me.
I was grouped in with everyone that Westerners called “savage,” but apparently I had some extra-human tactical skill they lacked. My legs were long and brown; I was Mowgli in the forest.
But Rudyard Kipling’s wolves were more welcoming than the wolves at school. Girls drew together in a mob to tell me off and pissed on my clothes during gym. Boys muttered as I passed. “Kike” was used less often because I could hide being Jewish, but when it arrived, the word was a knife.
In Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, the poetry critic John Frederick Nims describes the “k” sound as a stop, plosive, or explosive, along with fellow “p,” “b,” “t,” “d,” and “g” consonants. These are the drastic consonants, he says. “They cut off the air for a moment, let pressure build up behind the barrier of lips or tongue, then release it with a tiny explosion.”
In the galaxy of the English language, violent expletives persist. But you can voice half the dialogue, even if the other part is rubbish and hate. The rest you escape in your imagination.
The first time someone called me a nigger, I had no idea what it meant. I was riding my Schwinn bicycle with a pink-flowered banana seat and butterfly handles from which streamed shiny pink tassels when I flew into the wind at full speed.
I paused, one day, when a boy down the street yelled out from his front patio, and planted my feet on the ground in front of his lawn. When I saw a rock leave his fist and head my way, I moved my bike over to dodge it, but I stepped right into its path.
“Nigger,” he yelled. I went home crying, my head and hair all bloody. When I told my mother what had happened, I asked her what the word meant. She asked if he had called me that and I nodded yes.
What does it mean?
It is a bad word for Black people.
Am I Black?
No.
Am I closer to white or closer to Black?
White.
There was an edge in her voice. My mother was a fair-skinned Ashkenazi Jew who married an Indian man. I still wonder why she answered that way. I don’t know if it was racism or if she was worried that I’d be forever harassed for the color of my skin.
Maybe it was wishful thinking that outside this small town, I could pass, and so, for me, color would not be a disability. That incident taught me that no one can be trusted to tell you who you are (not even your mother), and that everyone has their own version of your humanity.
*
When I was a child in Bombay, I took swimming lessons at Breach Candy Swim Club’s indoor pool. Lessons got me nowhere and this had an impact on my ability not only to swim but to follow rules later.
I dreaded getting in at the deep end, and climbing down the stairs cascading down the inside of the pool, because they dropped off midair and abandoned me. I worried that as I sank, the water would capture and steal me. I was only just beginning to have a proper conversation with my body and didn’t want it to disappear.
I preferred the outdoor pool shaped like India, where Bombay’s expat society and Anglo-Indians gathered to crawl over the sun-sparkling blue surface, beguiled by easy geometries of sky, water, and, just a few meters to the west, the fifty-million-year-old Arabian Sea.
Admission to the swimming club was closed to Indians, unless you were an Indian like my father, married to a white woman like my mother. A refined, chocolate-skin local man, he was wildly visible to the whites at the pool but would have been an invisible member of the club—that is, not a member at all—but for my American mother’s passport.
Outside the pool, it was she who was perpetually visible, with milk-white skin beneath knee-length wrap skirts and bare-shouldered tops. All this in a city where he was invisible in a sea of similarly chocolate-skin Indian men married to sari-clad women.
We also belonged to the Officer’s Club, at the tip of the peninsula in South Bombay and twenty kilometers south of our home. (Breach Candy was down the street.) It didn’t have a swimming pool by the sea, but they admitted Indians, and what it had on Breach Candy was acreage and trees—I loved riding my marine-blue three-speed bicycle along the water—and the chance to “swim” in the sea.
Bobbing in the choppy water was dangerous and exciting, and it made me feel as if the whole world was shaking me inside its bottle of energy. Like all children at the club, I’d descend the slimy concrete stairs covered with seaweed, inside a life buoy tied to a rope hooked to the dock, and slide in.
How quickly the sea, even at its calmest, turned fortissimo around me. I doubt I ever stayed in for longer than five minutes, but those five minutes were filled with emergency and possibility, and they have lasted me fifty years.
An Indian man treaded water beside me in case the rope broke or I slipped out of the lifebuoy. He had no lifebuoy. I always wondered how he had developed the Odyssean swimming skills necessary to battle the currents.
For years, I had recurring nightmares in which I fell into the ocean and disappeared. At the edge of every peninsula and every seam between land and sea, the sea violently pulls at land from underneath, a reminder that we are fishermen, mermaids, and wrecked sailors who depend on the bounty and mythology of the sea.
When I watch these free divers and swimmers on YouTube, in the blue light of my computer screen, I wonder what it is about being underwater that does not frighten but intrigues me. That breath-holding balance in the bardo between the surface and the galaxy below my feet is where my flesh and bone become liquid. Vast conversations pulse by in the compassionate water. The sun falls with me, the sky rises above me.
When I watch these free divers and swimmers on YouTube, in the blue light of my computer screen, I wonder what it is about being underwater that does not frighten but intrigues me.
There is the temperature of the water and the temperature of skin and the absence between one and the other is the motion of my brain telling me that it is connected to my arms and synapses are firing inside my eyelids. I can talk through centuries to trilobites and octopuses inching by with tales of marine history. I am immersed in a body of water that resembles the soft cavern of a body, and there I am radically calm. My purpose is fixed.
I believe that we are always looking for ocean because we feel safer in anything that resembles a womb—before life gets to us and before we lose our facilities to take it in. Approximately four billion years ago, some biochemists believe, human life began in a fit of enzymes and four-hundred-degree heat from a hydrothermal vent in the ocean. We emerged, amphibian, from the oceanic abyss. This was the original womb we transmogrified in.
When we are just a cell in the womb, we have a genetic footprint already, but physically we start at zero. This is the process of becoming. The engine of our mothers’ bodies fabricates our eyes, feet, fingerprints, heart, and lungs, and assembles the building blocks of our personalities. What is hardwired and what is influenced is not yet determined.
______________________________
Happier Far by Diane Mehta is available via The University of Georgia Press. “Invisible Woman” was originally published in The Southern Humanities Review in spring 2020.
