When I was seven, we moved back to Bombay, leaving a wonderful life behind in England. I had only been to India once previously, as a child of two, so the ‘homecoming’ was quite traumatic. Everything about Bombay was different from what I had known — the number of people and the level of noise around me, the Indian-style toilets, apartment living and, worst of all, a new, unfamiliar school, a boys-only school to boot. To add to my woes, the home we moved to was bang in the middle of Shivaji Park, a middle-class, conservative, Marathi neighbourhood and a Shiv Sena stronghold — i.e., a very different kettle of fish from England, where we were simply weird foreigners who were expected to do things differently.

My alma mater, Antonio da Silva High School, was not too far away, in another middle-class Marathi neighbourhood, Dadar. With my close-cropped hair, stickyout ears, ‘Gandhi’ glasses and ‘posh’ foreign accent, I was a ripe target for bullying. Packs of boys I did not know would routinely jump me around corners and try to beat me up or snatch my glasses away.

That period did not last, however — unfortunately for my tormentors, I was strong for my age, and knew how to immobilize my adversaries with a wrestling hold or two. More frustratingly for them, I never displayed anger or fear, which would have made the game interesting and given them the high they were looking for. I did not snitch on them to the teachers either, so they had no good reason to gang up against me.

The bullies could not understand why I wasn’t reacting in the ‘normal’ ways. I suppose it was because I realized instinctively, despite being so young, that this would only prolong my engagement with them, when all I wanted was to be left alone. Eventually, out of sheer boredom and incomprehension, they stopped bothering me. That episode taught me a great lesson for life. If you have clarity on what you want — in my case, at that point, it was solitude — you can focus on that, instead of the stuff that is happening to you and around you. Without such clarity, you will invariably be pulled into your own or someone else’s drama and get derailed from where you are headed. As a boy at school, it was instinct that guided my behaviour. As an adult, I do this consciously.

I must have been nine when my parents enrolled my sisters and me at the Mahatma Gandhi Swimming Pool, an Olympic-sized community pool located around the corner from where we lived. For some reason, my initial, ineffectual flailing on the very crowded, shallow side of the pool caught the attention of the coach, Percy Hakim. He suggested I sign up for coaching classes, dangling the carrot of a dedicated strip of pool for his students during the less-crowded ‘Ladies’ Time.’ I did, and learnt to swim. I would not stop swimming for the next 14 years.

Coach Hakim’s somewhat rudimentary methods of training — the order ‘Keep Swimming!’, barked at us ad nauseam, was really the extent of it — left much to be desired, but it got results. In less than a year after I first learnt to swim, I won a silver medal at the national championships, in the under-11 category. Even though I would not win a medal of any colour again at the national level until I was 15, I kept going.

Two hours at the very least in the pool each day, swimming and swimming and swimming, was a punishing routine for a child, and I marvel that I did it, for so long, without protest, especially since I did not particularly enjoy swimming. Thinking back, I probably would have dropped out at some point if I hadn’t won that first medal. For a while it was true that I did not enjoy swimming, and had not entered the pool by choice, I certainly, back then, enjoyed winning. Even if I wasn’t among the medal winners at the national level between ages 11 and 15, I was at the state level, and that was incentive enough.

Swimming was also, although I didn’t think of it that way then, an activity tailor-made for me. Even though I always trained with a large bunch of people, I did not have to interact with them too much — when your face is in the water, there is very little need, or opportunity, for conversation. My swimming routine helped me believe that I was constantly working towards something — the next championship, the next win — and filled my days with structure and purpose. I know that modern educationists believe that too much structure makes robots out of children, and does not allow them to give free rein to their imaginations, but as with other things like fitness regimens, food and medicine, what suits one child may not suit another. I certainly benefited from structure, and I can say with conviction that my structured childhood — and adolescence — did not affect my ability or my eagerness to seek out and explore unconventional paths in later years.

In any case, what would I have done with my time if I wasn’t swimming? Unlike others of my age, I did not enjoy playing cricket or sitting on compound walls with other kids, shooting the breeze, watching the world go by. My family did not own a television — Baba gave away our TV set within a year of us moving to Bombay, and we did not have one again until I turned 30, when I bought one for Aai so that she could watch me in a television show. I wasn’t given pocket money, so there was no incentive to check out the shops. There was another thing. My sisters were also swimming competitively, and winning races themselves, which meant they were training each day as well. If they had been playing board games at home, or lolling about reading, I may have resented the daily slog in the pool. But swimming was something we all did as a family — Aai chaperoning us to championships in other cities as and when required, and the rest of us doing it as part of our daily lives, a routine as commonplace as going to school.

Like everything else, a lifetime of good health — physical, mental, spiritual — begins in the home of your childhood. But it is also never too late for anyone to begin the journey to well-being by themselves. Ask yourself what well-being means to you, and why you want it, and then, like the ad line goes, just do it.

Edited excerpts from ‘Keep Moving’ by Milind Soman, Ankita Konwar and Usha Soman by Juggernaut Books