MUMBAI, February 6: Chances are Vishruti Vora would have quit.After nearly nine hours of battling the murky, salty Arabian Sea waters - with a particularly difficult 90-minute stretch of choppy waves - the 11-year-old felt tired. And her destination, The Gateway of India, was still five kilometres away.But the five-foot something restless bundle of energy has never been one to give up. She is used to challenges and this was just another one.Born a dextrocardia baby with Situs Inversus (which meant her heart was on the right side and her liver on the left - an exact mirror image of normal human beings) put parents in a quandary. A one in a million occurrence, the doctors then said, but not a handicap.``It is a rare case, but certainly not abnormal. Just an anomaly,'' says Vishruti's doctor Bharat Shah, an opinion echoed by noted cardiologist Dr D Anand. ``It's rare but its not a disability,'' says Dr Anand of dextrocardia.While parents D K Vora and mother Shobhna heaved a sigh of relief,little Vishruti - which means celebrity - took no notice of the peculiarity and let her energy loose on a variety of outdoor activities.She took to sports - swimming and tennis in particularly - with such exuberance that nobody believed she was different. During one biology session on human anatomy in her school Maneckji Cooper, Juhu, the standard sixth student sprang up to correct her teacher when she remarked on the position of the heart in the human body. ``But not always,'' she corrected. ``Mine is on the right.''The teacher saw the point, her class-mates did not. ``It took an article in another newspaper for them all to see what I meant,'' Vishruti grinned.But she remains different in the sense of her immense energy and restlessness. She wouldn't sit still for a moment. Not surprisingly, she wants to be a pilot when she grows up so that she could ``travel lots''.Restlessness forced her to try snorkling (swimming with a snorkle - a tube which allows the swimmer to breathe whileunderwater) during a trip to the Andaman Islands and she enjoyed it enormously. Soon, she was off snorkling with friends, leaving her parents behind for failing to be as proficient as she was in the new-found pastime. And if she couldn't swim, no problems. Like in Jaipur, when the swimming pool was empty, she just played handball in it!Changes came thick and fast. Saurav Ganguly is her current favourite, replacing Sachin Tendulkar who has just ``stopped performing''.Tennis is out. Squash is in. ``Because her friend Deepali (Anvekar) is going abroad on sponsorship, so she too wants to play,'' explained her mother Shobhna of her only child's change in preferences.A couple of rides on Juhu beach and she was hooked. It was riding lessons from next summer vacations and she has even got her favourite horse, Nabela, at Mahalaxmi now.But swimming remains her first love. She gave up competitive swimming because ``the competition is too tough.'' She swam from Mora, Uran to the Gateway, a distance of 12 kmsin 3.23 hours on December 24. And she has now set sights on the English Channel, which is still shorter than the distance she covered on January 28.Tired after swimming all night over lonely, often turbulent waters, Vishruti started having doubts. She had dived in at 12.50 a.m. at Dharamtar and a few hours after dawn, she still hadn't completed her journey.But the sight of the Gateway erased all doubts.Egged on by relatives and friends, which included coach Ramakant Gajinkar, she limbed the Gateway steps at 11.10 a.m., after a 10-hour, 10-minute, seven-second ordeal.And at the end of it, all that she wanted was a tomato soup at the Taj.She got it.
