Paris is presented through remembered stories rather than as the setting of a described visit: for Pi Patel, the city takes shape in the swimming-pool lore of Francis Adirubasamy, his swimming instructor and an enthusiastic storyteller. The pools become a vivid map of Paris, from a barge on the Seine to the polished splendor of the Piscine Molitor Swimming Pool.

Paris in Francis Adirubasamy’s Recollections

Francis Adirubasamy studied in Paris for two years, with support from the colonial administration, during the early 1930s. Pi Patel cannot recall precisely what he studied and supposes it was something commercial. What stayed with him was the subject of Francis’s stories: swimming pools and competitions, not the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, or the city’s cafés. Through that selective memory, Paris is less a catalogue of famous sights than a place measured in water, changing rooms, and swimming lanes.

The recollections also place Paris alongside the French colonial effort to make Pondicherry more Gallic, just as the British sought to make the rest of India Britannic. That political context is brief, but it gives Francis’s years in Paris a wider frame: the city was both a place he had lived and part of the colonial world that connected it to Pi Patel’s home.

Pools of Unequal Distinction

Francis’s account of the Piscine Deligny establishes the contrast between Olympic renown and imperfect conditions. Dating from 1796, it was an open-air barge moored to the Quai d’Orsay and hosted the swimming events of the 1900 Olympics. Its pool was six metres too long, however, so the recorded times were not recognized by the International Swimming Federation. The water came straight from the Seine, unfiltered and unheated; Francis recalled it as cold and dirty, and said the pool’s visitors made it worse.

Bain Royal, another Seine-side bath, fares still worse in his telling. Francis described it as a latrine and said that at least Deligny’s staff scooped out the dead fish. The indignity does not erase the appeal of Olympic association: Deligny remains touched by what Francis presents as immortal glory, even as his fondness for it coexists with disgust at its water.

Other pools offered different compromises. The Piscines Chateau-Landon, Rouvet, and du boulevard de la Gare were indoors, roofed, and open year-round. Their water came from condensation produced by nearby steam engines, making it cleaner and warmer than the Seine-fed alternatives, though the pools could be dingy and crowded. Francis joked about the gob and spit in the water as resembling jellyfish. By contrast, the Piscines Hebert, Ledru-Rollin, and Butte-aux-Cailles were bright, modern, spacious, and supplied by artesian wells; in his account, they set the standard for municipal swimming pools.

The Piscine Molitor Swimming Pool

The Piscine Molitor Swimming Pool stands above these comparisons as the crowning aquatic glory of Paris in Francis’s estimation. His inventory of its features makes that praise concrete: it had indoor and outdoor pools, both immense in scale, and two indoor lanes reserved for swimmers doing lengths. He remembered water so clear it could have been used to make morning coffee, a striking reversal after the polluted Seine and the crowded baths.

The surrounding arrangements completed the picture. Blue-and-white wooden changing cabins stood on two floors around the pool, with porters marking occupied doors in chalk. Francis recalled the porters as limping old men, friendly despite their ill temper, and unruffled by shouting and tomfoolery. Hot showers, a steam room, an exercise room, a bar, a cafeteria, and a large sunning deck extended the place beyond swimming. In winter, the outdoor pool became a skating rink; two small beaches with real sand and gleaming tile, brass, and wood gave the complex an almost self-contained worldliness.

A City Told Through Water

The sequence of pools gives Paris a narrative shape: Deligny’s Olympic prestige is compromised by polluted water and a pool too long for recognized times; indoor baths improve on the river but remain crowded; modern artesian-fed pools approach a civic ideal; and the Piscine Molitor Swimming Pool becomes the culminating exception. Francis’s affection does not depend on pretending every pool was clean or comfortable. His stories hold squalor and grandeur together, making the city memorable through their contrast.

For Pi Patel, this is also a portrait of Francis’s way of telling stories. Paris becomes intimate not through a record of its monuments but through precise, practical details—water sources, lengths, lanes, porters, and changing cabins—and through the enthusiasm with which Francis ranks them. The city’s strongest presence in this childhood recollection is therefore not geographic breadth but a particular attachment: the glory of a swimming pool imagined through the memories of a man who loved swimming.