Rohinton Mistry's "Swimming Lessons"

In his short story detailing a portion of the life of a writer living in Toronto and the nature of his correspondence with his parents in India, Mistry touches particularly on the theme of cause and effect and its mirror, effect and cause. Mistry refers to this ambiguous dichotomy in various contexts: as osteoporosis being an illness that “hollow[s] out the bones and turn[s] effect into cause” (237), and also in his questioning of the relationship between the high rate of divorce in Parsi community and its increasing westernization, asking “which is a result of the other?”(238). This motif of cause and effect is present less explicitly in the text’s ideas surrounding the act of writing. The parents of the narrator are puzzled by his lack of writing regarding his home of Toronto, voicing the common perception that “writers use their own experience to make stories” (256). In this statement lies an issue central to literary theory, particularly in a post-colonial context: does our identity inform our writing, or does our writing give form to our identity? Later on in the story the narrator’s parents also voice the concern that if their son becomes more assimilated and less like an immigrant, “he will write like one of them [a Canadian?] and lose the important difference” (259). Whereas before they were concerned that the true “essence”—if you will—of their son’s writing wasn’t making it into his work, now they are worried that writing in a certain way will change who he is. Reinforcing this, the narrator's mother makes the statement that his father is "confusing fiction with facts, fiction does not create facts...you must not confuse what really happened with what the story says happened, you must not loose your grasp on reality, that way madness lies" (261).