Strait shooter: A Wknd interview with the parents of autistic record-setting swimmer Jiya Rai

Standing on the jetty at Talaimannar in Sri Lanka, Madan Rai gazed at the expanse of the Indian Ocean. It was a cloudy night and the sea was choppy. A wind was picking up.

Rai, a sailor with the Indian Navy, knew that low tide was in a few hours. On the boat nearby, the 2 am alarm buzzed and woke his daughter Jiya Rai. She planned to begin her swim at 3.30 am.

Open-sea swimming is a test of human endurance, and demands a favourable alignment of factors: wind, currents, tides.

In recent years, Jiya, 13, had defied autism to secure a clutch of remarkable records. That day, her goal was to swim across the Palk Strait, from Talaimannar to Dhanushkodi in Tamil Nadu, and break a record that had stood since 2004.

Bula Chowdhary set that world record for best time by a woman swimmer, 13 hours and 52 minutes. By the time Jiya was done, on the afternoon of March 20, the new record was 13 hours and 10 minutes. But at 2 am, that was still in the future.

At 2 am, Rai was still warily watching the sea. He knew that the longer they waited for the wind to dip, the longer his daughter would end up swimming in the unforgiving sun. A receding tide would make it that much harder.

“Open-water swimmers are used to such delays,” says Chowdhary, a multiple national-record holder. “That is where your mental strength comes in. You have to tell yourself that you’re good enough to swim anywhere, anytime.”

Jiya wasn’t even looking at the sea. She began her stretching exercises, ate a couple of apples, drank a litre of water. At 4.22 am, she dove into the Indian Ocean.

A swimmer is typically accompanied by a few boats, including a navigator boat that leads. Food and fluids are provided at regular intervals. Still, you are essentially alone, Chowdhury says.

“Anyone who is attempting a swimming expedition is obviously an expert swimmer. What sets them apart are their mental reserves,” she adds. “Can you stay positive? Can you trust yourself?… Have you ever been in the middle of nothingness at night? That’s how the sea feels at dark.”

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Naval officer Madan Rai and teacher Rachana Rai of Varanasi married in 2003. Jiya, their first child, was born on May 10, 2008. (Their second, Vaibhav Rai, was born two years later.)

The Rais first noticed that something was different when, at 15 months, Jiya was still not speaking. A doctor suggested they “spend more time” with her.

At Jiya’s second birthday party, the Rais knew that wasn’t it. Jiya showed no interest in her cake and gifts. She barely spoke, and kept trying to get away from it all by retreating to a vacant room.

Another doctor diagnosed autism spectrum disorder. “It was the first time we had heard the term. We came home, switched on the computer, and looked it up. We were dumbfounded,” says Madan, 41.

The parents began to research the condition online. With Jiya, they began working with a paediatrician on speech and occupational therapies. They realised that Jiya could learn, even if it did take her much longer, Madan says. The parents were hopeful.

But outside the home, there were other problems to face. At the neighbourhood park, there were cruel remarks from adults and children. “Either Jiya was made fun of or not spoken to at all. Some parents called her ‘pagal’ (deranged),” Madan says.

Wounded, the family stopped going to the park. They discovered a local swimming pool that very few children frequented. That’s how Jiya began to swim. She was only two, but she instantly loved it, Madan says. By five, Jiya was swimming the breaststroke, backstroke, freestyle, and butterfly.

“There was a visible change in her body language in the pool,” he says. “She appeared happy and had lots of energy. It was a real task to get her out!”

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At 6, Jiya began school. She didn’t have any friends, her mother says. “She was often called ‘mental’. Other kids would make fun of her. There was plain lack of sensitivity,” says Madan.

Rachana quit her job and enlisted as Jiya’s shadow teacher. Things improved a little when Jiya won two inter-class swimming medals two months later. She entered her classroom to a standing ovation. “That is where our lives took a turn. She’d found respect and recognition. We knew her happiness lay in water. We increased her practice time from 30 minutes a day to 2.5 hours.”

Jiya took happily to the new routine. Every evening, Madan would return from work to find her waiting to go to the pool. “She knew she had to be there by 7. If I was late, she would grow restless,” he says, laughing.

She was also winning, over and over. “At first, she couldn’t tell if she had won or lost. Gradually, she began to understand that trophies meant wins. Then she began flashing a victory sign after crossing the line first,” says Rachana, 39.

A new turning point appeared later that year. At an inter-school competition in Mumbai in 2014, a seasoned coach, Vidyadhar Gharat, approached the Rais to say that, guided properly, Jiya had the potential to swim for India. They were thrilled. But this would be a new phase of learning for them all.

Gharat had never worked with an autistic child before. He could not get Jiya to listen or follow instruction. Rachana decided to become her daughter’s shadow swim coach too. But first, she had to learn to swim.

As Rachana did her laps, at home, Madan and his daughter studied footage of American swim legend Michael Phelps on a new 56” TV. Jiya absorbed by watching, her father says. Her strokes improved, as did her swim times.

By 2017, Gharat was suggesting open-water swimming, and the Rais found themselves on a beach in Malvan, Maharashtra, watching their nine-year-old daughter set out on a 1-km race. She finished sixth of 200 competitors. Gharat was now convinced that she was at her best in longer races.

“Jiya is tireless and supremely strong for her age. Also, she has a tremendous work ethic,” Gharat says. Rachana recalls Jiya’s happiness when she switched from the pool to the sea. “She was a kid in a candy shop. She would leap like a dolphin, and the smile never left her. It was the happiest she had been.”

She was winning on a larger scale now. Jiya won gold medals in 5km and 1 km events, in both 2020 and 2022, setting a new national 5 km record last year, and then breaking it earlier this year.

The idea of swimming across the Palk Strait came about after Jiya swam from Mumbai’s Bandra-Worli Sea Link to Gateway of India in 8 hours and 40 minutes, in February 2021, aged 12. “I was confident that she could break Bula’s record. Jiya could swim for three hours non-stop, without feeling the need to stop for a sip of water,” Gharat says.

Jiya grinned at the mention of a new milestone. Gharat began training her in the Arabian Sea. Madan analysed data to deduce when the sea would be least turbulent, and the date of March 20 was fixed.

Rachana took on the task of preparing her daughter psychologically. She marked March 20 on a calendar and showed it to Jiya multiple times a day, telling her it was going to be the most difficult swim of her life (the swim from the sea link to Gateway was 36 km and the one from Sri Lanka to India would be 28.5 km, but the depths of the Palk Strait are far more turbulent and intimidating than the waters just off the Mumbai coast).

“We designed a poster with the lighthouses of Talaimannar and Dhanushkodi and indicated to her that she needed to swim to the latter before 6 pm IST. She has good recollection of images and timings, so we used them as key communication tools,” Rachana says.

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“If you are scared even for a second, you must pull out immediately. Fear has no place in ocean swimming,” says Bula Chowdhary. Madan’s understanding of fear is similar. “Jiya can’t speak, but I can tell you with full confidence that she doesn’t fear the sea,” he says.

His daughter started her swim in the Palk Strait with the wind and current against her. In three hours, she covered only 5 of her 28.5 km. Then, around 7.30 am, the sea became placid and wind speeds dropped. Jiya tore across the ocean.

“Towards the end, once you see the lighthouse, you get the push. I remember being so tired that I prayed a giant wave or a friendly dolphin would throw me closer to the finish line,” laughs Chowdhary.

The lighthouse at Dhanushkodi became visible to Jiya at around 2.10 pm. She was now in Indian waters. The tide had begun to turn again, but it didn’t matter. The finish line was in sight. “She pointed at the lighthouse, and then at her watch,” Rachana says. “She knew that she had won.”