In our village July means water. Everybody swims in the canal: boys, girls, grandfathers, two donkeys and a dog called Bulut.
At fourteen, Nilufar could not swim.
She could run faster than her brothers. She could carry two buckets of water up a hill without stopping. But she could not put her face in the water, and everybody in that village knew it.
When she was six she sank in that canal for four seconds, and her uncle pulled her out by the arm. Four seconds. After that, water was not water any more. It was a hand.
Her cousin Zuhra came for the summer and made a plan of three weeks.
Week one: Nilufar sat on the concrete edge with her feet in the shallow water and blew bubbles from her mouth. Nothing else.
Week two: she held the edge and let her legs come up behind her. She wasn't able to keep her breath quiet, and twice she stood up and cried with her hands over her face.
Week three: she let go of the concrete for two seconds. Then five. Then she floated on her back and looked at the sky for a whole minute, which is longer than four seconds, and she understood that too.
In August she was able to swim to the other side of the canal, once, with Zuhra beside her all the way.
Nilufar is twenty-six now. She can swim a kilometre without stopping, but that is not the interesting part.
She works at the town pool. She teaches the children who arrive holding their mother's hand, the ones who can't put their faces in the water. Two hundred and forty of them have been able to learn in her lane since 2019.
She starts every first lesson with the same sentence: "I couldn't do this until I was fourteen."