It was cold and dark when SP Muraleedharan dove into the waters of the Palk Strait from a boat docked a few metres off the Talaimannar coast near Jaffna in Sri Lanka.
This was his second attempt. So he knew what lay ahead—swift undercurrents and venomous snakes apart from fatigue, failure, death or the fulfilment of a life-long desire.
“At first, everything went well,” says Muraleedharan. He was swimming comfortably at 4 km per hour, a pace, which if sustained, would take him to the finishing point, 31 km away at Dhanushkodi in Tamil Nadu, in 10 hours.
But an hour later, the generator in the boat broke down and the flashlight went out. With visibility compromised, he ran the risk of veering off course. He could end up swimming a great distance yet get nowhere, like it happened in his first attempt. So he slowed down to 1.5 km per hour, and swam for hours in the dark.
Then the sun started to rise. Muraleedharan began to swim ferociously, and, finally, he could see the Indian flag. There was barely a kilometre left.
But suddenly the Bay of Bengal turned hostile. The waves came pounding at him. For every stroke he made to move forward, he was pushed back five times the distance.
The logical step was to call off the mission, but that meant failure. For Muraleedharan, who failed in high school thrice, cleaned pools for a living, failed in swims across the English Channel and the Palk Strait, this was his last shot at success.
So he dredged out the last bit of energy and swam away from the flag, circumventing the ferocious waves. “Four kilometres later, I touched Dhanushkodi,” he says.
In total, he had swum more than 45 km in 14 hours and 23 minutes and became the first man from Kerala to cross the 31-km Palk Strait.
This swim took place on March 20, 2012. Now, at 40, he is getting ready to meet twin challenges—the Strait of Gibraltar and the English Channel.
Recently, Muraleedharan also published his autobiography. Born to a tailor and a farmer in the coastal village of Pallipuram, Muraleedharan grew up swimming in the backwaters of Alappuzha.
He first shot to fame when he swam the 21-km stretch of the Vembanad Lake between Kavanattinkara and Puthanagadi in Alappuzha in 2001. In 2002, he swam 41 km non-stop through the Punnamada Lake. Then he attempted swimming across the English Channel and the Palk Strait.
“It was difficult to get sponsors, so there was little time to undergo enough training before these attempts,” he says.
There were other difficulties, too. Unlike the English Channel, Muraleedharan said, there is no agency to obtain the permission to cross the Palk Strait. “I travelled for months between Kochi, Chennai and Delhi to get the required sanctions from the Indian and Sri Lankan ministries, navies, port trusts and coast guards,” he says.
A guest service executive at the ITC Welcome Hotel in New Delhi, Muraleedharan is under the tutelage of Anand M Pardeshi, swimming programme director and head coach at The Juhu Gymkhana Club, Mumbai. His training, at present, is about increasing his body strength.
Muraleedharan plans to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in June. He is expected to leave for Spain by May-end so that he will have one month of training in the Mediterranean Sea.
“Marathon swimming is strenuous,” he says. “You need to understand the nature of the channel you wish to cross and the limitations of your body,” he adds.