Termination Shock

Chandigarh

Laks took the move from Amritsar to Chandigarh as an opportunity to do a little more traveling around the Land of Five Rivers. He had actually seen very little of it so far. It was at this point that the social network—no, the society—that he’d become a part of, just by sticking with it, humping the langar’s lentils and digging the akhara’s dirt, came into its own and he saw its full power and virtue. Sikhs were well represented among truck drivers. Pick a road out of town and everyone knew someone who would be driving a truck or a bus or even a motorbike in that direction soon. And if not soon enough, there was free food at the langar and maybe some pointers on where to find a place to sleep. So once he had established a basic fund of trust and cred, grown his beard out, learned how to dress and how to talk, then, just by virtue of being a likely young man traveling on his own he was able to move around the Punjab, if not always quickly, then at least cheaply. In a way, the less he spent, the easier it got, for people were more willing to help out a scrappy wanderer sleeping rough than they were a Canadian tourist with a fat wallet.

His objective was to go and visit all five of the eponymous rivers: from north to south, the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas, and the Sutlej. Eventually all of them flowed into the Indus, the great river that gave India its name.

He was under no particular compulsion to do this. It wasn’t a ritual pilgrimage or anything like that. It just appealed somehow to his innate sense of completeness. He’d be able to say that he had really seen the Punjab.

Amritsar was right between the Ravi and the Beas, so those were easy day trips. He went to the site on the western bank of the Beas where Alexander the Great had thrown in the towel, abandoned all hope of adding Pentapotamia to his empire, and turned back toward far Macedonia with his exhausted and disgruntled troops.

The Ravi coincided, along part of its course, with the India-Pakistan border, cutting the Punjab in half—an amputation that had led to a great deal of trouble and explained in a roundabout way why Laks’s family were running gas stations in Canada. Since the fateful year of 1947 the river had evinced a total lack of respect for the boundary line solemnly drawn on maps, and strayed to either side of it as floods pushed it out of its banks. By choosing a meander that looped into India, Laks was able to visit the Ravi, wade in its water, and evaluate fish habitats without having to go through the rigamarole of crossing into Pakistan. In the minds of his people, what lay on the other side was West Punjab. He’d have liked to visit it. But he had now overstayed his six-month tourist visa. He was in India illegally. He could cross over into Pakistan, but not come back in. And being stuck in Pakistan was not on his bucket list.

The Chenab and the Jhelum ran decisively through Pakistan in their middle courses. Farther north, though, closer to their mountain wellsprings, they could be reached in Kashmir. So that leg of the trip was the first time Laks had seen mountains since coming to India.

He found that he had missed mountains. In Canada they just plunged straight down into the ocean. At night in Vancouver you could see skeins of light suspended in midair high above street ends: ski areas just outside of town, illuminated for nocturnal customers. He had gone up there and snowboarded with his friends. He missed that dimensionality to the landscape.

He got into a spot of trouble when, on his way back south, he encountered a roadblock where Indian authorities were checking IDs. It all had to do with the border dispute between Pakistan and India. So he had to bail out of the truck he was riding in—no feat at all, since it was stopped dead in a five-mile-long traffic jam, and the driver had switched off the engine—and backtrack on foot. Eventually he hitchhiked his way into the neighboring province of Himachal Pradesh and then found his way back down into East Punjab just by hiking across the border in a mountainous area where there could be no roadblocks, since there were no roads. That was his first encounter with Indian wilderness, which—obvious as it might sound—was just that. No one lived there. The landscape was natural. When he did happen upon a road, he hitchhiked back down into the lowlands, feeling he’d made a connection with the ancient gurus. For many had been the occasions when early Sikh leaders had been forced by martial setbacks to withdraw into these hills and lie low for months or years.

The Sutlej, by contrast, meandered across flat territory, absolute Breadbasket land, not as spectacular as Kashmir until you got your head around the sheer amount of food being produced in the green fields that the river watered. Then it was as impressive in its way as mountains. Apparently a lot of other people down through the centuries had shared the same view, for the area he happened to visit, around Ferozpur, was speckled with battle memorials.

He ended up in Chandigarh, which was a very different place from Amritsar. Both were cities of a little more than a million souls, but from that point the resemblances tapered off in a hurry. Chandigarh was a new, planned city that had been plunked down by government mandate post-1947, whereas Amritsar was so old that people there claimed, with apparent sincerity, that it had been founded by gods. While there were definitely a lot of Sikhs in Chandigarh, they were outnumbered six to one by Hindus.

Not that this statistic really mattered in Laks’s daily life once he had found a rooming house and a gurdwara, both close enough to his new akhara that running between them was often faster than dealing with vehicles. Like everything else here, the akhara was new. They wrestled on foam mats and used weight machines. There were showers. Joris and gadas were certainly available for those who were hip to them. In the adjacent sports complex, laid out by the city’s benevolent planners, were green fields where training could happen in the open. The mission of this akhara seemed a little different; they were somewhat self-consciously making an effort to inculcate youngsters in traditional ways, whereas the guys at the akhara in Amritsar were just doing it because they had always done it. Those guys didn’t have a mission statement. People showed up, or they didn’t. Here, though, the kids were sent. A lot of them were delivered to the place along Chandigarh’s modern, rationally designed street plan, by the local equivalent of soccer moms or even by paid drivers. The akhara was providing a service. Oh, not in some shitty hucksterish way. Not at all. These guys couldn’t have been more pure, more sincere. It was just a little different.

Anyway, they didn’t really know what to do with Laks either. It didn’t help that he was, to be honest, practicing a somewhat impure form of the art. It turned out that there were a lot of other people in the world besides Punjabis who knew a thing or two about fighting with the ancient and ubiquitous weapon known as the stick. Growing up in Richmond he’d had access to schools of Filipino and Malaysian martial arts up in Vancouver as well as down across the border in Seattle. So mixed in with his traditional gatka moves—which he knew how to do very well—were foreign bits. Improvements or impurities depending on your point of view. Styles of movement that looked inscrutable, or just wrong, in the akhara.

The characteristic movements of gatka were gracile. Hopping and twirling that sometimes caused Westerners to misconstrue it as mere sword dance—an artistic endeavor that might have been derived from martial roots but was now far removed from anything that would work in practice. In fact those movements all made perfect martial sense when you were on uneven ground, outnumbered, and engulfed in murderous opponents—which in a broader Sikh history context was pretty much all the time. Not just Alexander’s Macedonians but Persians, Afghans, Pathans, Baluchis, Mughals, Gurkhas, Rajputs, Marathas, and British at one time or another had attempted to seize control of the Breadbasket. The list of tortures used to put prisoners of war to death was long and incredibly imaginative. So constantly moving around to see who was coming up behind you—considered a bad idea in some martial arts—made sense here.

All well and good. But what Laks had added was some additional biomechanics that had to do with landing powerful blows without big movements and obvious windups. Better suited, perhaps, for moments when the wild melee had resolved to one-on-one combat. Any martial artist of any size could amplify what physical power nature had given them by using these techniques. But when Laks had used them at full power against practice targets in Amritsar, the senior guys at the akhara had got a certain look on their faces that he had enjoyed seeing at the time, but that in retrospect was them making up their minds that the big weird Canadian had to leave.

This new akhara was a legit business. They had a logo. Because of the visa situation, they could not employ him in any capacity. Nor would it really have been ethical for Laks to accept employment of any sort. Even unloading sacks of potatoes at a langar could be seen as taking work away from people who needed it more than he did. To this was now added the possibility of landing an employer in hot water legally. The bracelet that Laks wore on his wrist was a constant reminder to do no wrong with his strong right arm, or any other part of his body for that matter. His uncle Dharmender had once explicitly stated—just in case this point had eluded him—that this included his penis. So far, he had remained chaste while in India, both because of that memorable conversation (it had happened while Uncle Dharmender was changing the brake pads in a Subaru) and because getting involved with a local girl could have incalculable consequences that were likely to be all or mostly bad.

So Laks was allowed to hang around and work out at the akhara, but he was a man apart except when he was training with Ranjit, that being the “old” (he was maybe fifty-five) stick master who had agreed to work with him. They would go off to an out-of-the-way part of the adjoining field and train.

There was nothing precisely wrong with that, but it was anticlimactic in the sense that Ranjit told Laks after a couple of weeks that he had no special advanced techniques to teach him that would turn Laks into some exalted master. It was stick fighting. There wasn’t that much to say about it. “It’s like running,” he said. “You can learn a few tricks that will make you run faster but basically you just have to run.” Laks, Ranjit said, already knew enough that he could fly home and hang out a shingle in Richmond, or any other place with a large Sikh population, and operate a totally legitimate school. Was that what he wanted? Was that why he had come all this way? Done.

In fact, that idea had never crossed Laks’s mind, and so he had to think about it. But perhaps it was already obvious to Ranjit, from the look on Laks’s face, that hanging out a shingle in Canada was not the objective here.

Ranjit then got a clouded look on his face that Laks thought he had seen once or twice before in Amritsar. He could guess what it was.

Laks was a Canadian who had made the choice to leave Vancouver’s affluence behind and return to the Punjab and get in touch with his roots. Fine. He’d overstayed his visa. A little troubling, but it could be overlooked as youthful enthusiasm. Now he had failed to rise to the bait of going home in triumph and becoming a suburban martial arts instructor. What, then, did this stranger really want?

Decades ago, Vancouver had been the base of operations of a cell of Sikh separatists who had wanted to pull West and East Punjab out of Pakistan and India and form an independent country called Khalistan. Long before Laks had been born, they had perfected a time bomb in the wilderness outside the city and then used it to blow up a 747 full of passengers. Since then the group had gone into eclipse as its support base in the community (to the extent that that even existed) had dried up and it had been hammered by anti-terrorist authorities in India and many other countries. The Russians had used a disinformation scheme to trick the Indian government into believing that the Sikhs were getting support from Pakistan and the CIA. Those had been bad times.

So that kind of extremism was less of a concern these days. It was just common sense really. Laks could remember a conversation with Uncle Dharmender in a gas station back office outside of Kamloops, where the geopolitics of it all had been summed up for Laks’s edification using cans of oil and a chessboard. “Us,” Uncle Dharmender had said, pulling a chess piece—it was a white rook—out of the box and setting it down in the middle of the board. Then, next to it, he had slammed down a quart can of 10W-40. “India. Second-largest country in the world. Nuclear bombs and space rockets.” He had then slammed down a gallon of antifreeze. “China. Biggest country. H-bombs.” Then another oil can, bracketing the forlorn rook in an equilateral triangle. “You know who. Fifth largest. Plutonium and crazy men.” He had looked up at Laks. “What do you think the future of this”—he had plucked out the rook and held it up—“looks like as a so-called independent nation?”

So being a separatist insurgent couldn’t have been further from Laks’s mind. But Ranjit was within his rights to be worried about it. For all he knew Laks might be one such. Maybe a forerunner of some new wackazoid splinter group that no one here had ever heard of. Or, perhaps worse, and more plausibly, some kind of undercover agent trolling through the community trying to gull people into admitting that they would support such activities. So Laks had to explain himself in a hurry. And it caused him to blurt something out that he’d barely realized was on his mind until now: “In all honesty, Ranjit, my future is most likely to join the military, and there to use my abilities in service of my nation.” Then, for the avoidance of doubt, he specified, “Canada.”

Ranjit nodded. “They allow you to have the Five Ks.” He was referring to the bracelet, turban, and other religious emblems carried on the person by observant Sikhs.

“Yes. I had looked into applying for Indian citizenship, but—”

Ranjit was already shaking his head. As they both knew, dual citizenship was not allowed by India. He’d have to turn in the Canadian passport. Ranjit said, “If your goal is to serve with honor as a saint-soldier defending a country that has a lot of our brothers and sisters within its borders, do it in Canada.”

He was styling this as a savvy choice for Laks, which it undoubtedly was. But once again Laks was getting that signal—polite but firm—that he should move on. And when he nodded in agreement, Ranjit’s misgivings about him seemed to melt away. “I admire your choice and I think you will serve with honor and do us proud,” he said. “Now, in what way may I help you realize this noble goal?”

They talked it through. If Laks actually wanted to get any better at stick fighting than he already was, the only way to do it was to actually participate in stick fights and test and hone his skills in something like real combat, where the penalty for putting your hand in harm’s way was not a reprimand from the teacher, or a light rap on the knuckles, but a broken finger. To a degree you could get that in the sportified version of gatka, where contestants in modern protective gear competed on polished gymnasium floors under the eye of whistle-blowing referees. There was nothing wrong in doing that. A few victories, a trophy maybe, could burnish his credentials.

But he didn’t need credentials. And it bore the same relation to the actual combat art as Olympic foil fencing did to medieval longsword combat.

And here was where Laks was waiting for the other shoe to drop: the moment when Ranjit would lean in close and, in a low voice, clue him in to the existence of a secret underground network of hard-core gatka fighters doing it for real, with real sticks and real consequences. But that was just Laks having spent too many lonely hours watching cheesy martial arts videos.

Instead Ranjit said, “Virtually no one does real full-contact gatka, and the ones that do—or that boast of it anyway—wouldn’t likely do it with you, because they would be afraid for their lives. Look, it’s just not ethical. If I knew people who did it, I would tell you to avoid them. I wouldn’t send you to them.” Ranjit seemed a bit exasperated. “You’re not going to find that in the Punjab. At least, I hope not! The only people within a thousand miles doing that sort of thing are those lunatics.”

He said the last two words in English. And then he nodded. The presence of a big orange turban on his head conferred additional gravity and vehemence to this slight gesture.

Laks turned in the direction indicated and saw—what?

An artificial turf field where some boys were playing cricket. Almost certainly these were not the lunatics to which Ranjit was alluding.

Beyond that, a busy street, lots of traffic in the customary slapstick Indian style, but nothing in particular happening—certainly no knock-down, drag-out stick fights.

On the other side of the road, the typical Indian cityscape of five-story buildings. A higher modern skyline in the distance. This eventually faded into a low brown haze layer, which was there all the time.

But on this day the smog wasn’t as bad as usual and so his gaze was suddenly captured by an impossibly high rampart of perfectly white mountains in the great distance, erupting out of the haze like clean teeth from tobacco-stained gums. Making the best the Canadian Rockies had to offer look miserable and tiny by comparison.

“Are you talking about the Himalayan fucking Mountains?” Laks asked. The profanity was unusual. They were amazing mountains. But very definitely not the Punjab.

Ranjit seemed surprised that Laks didn’t know. “You need to educate yourself,” he said, “about what goes on up at the Line of Actual Control.” He seemed almost to bite his tongue. “Please don’t tell any of your loved ones that I suggested it.”