Termination Shock

Himachal Pradesh

Perhaps it was coincidence. Or perhaps there was no such thing as a coincidence. But Laks’s conversation with Ranjit happened at around the same time as some other events that, like tributaries feeding into a river in the high mountains, all contributed their force to what happened next.

First of all it was September, which might seem like high summer, but it meant that the snows would begin soon, and if he wanted to get up to the Line of Actual Control, he needed to get moving.

Second: There was this family that had begun showing up at the langar attached to the gurdwara that Laks had been attending. They’d been literally starving the first time they wandered in. They would probably go back to starving if they skipped a day. They were decidedly not from around here. They were refugees who had come down out of the Himalayas on the back of a truck. But they had originated much farther north than that. They did not speak Hindi or Punjabi. Nor did they look like the kinds of people who would. Nor were they Tibetan. The group consisted of a mother, a granny, and four kids ranging from about five to fifteen years of age. The fifteen-year-old, a boy named Ilham, spoke English. Laks had seen them across the room but not bothered them, since it seemed that not starving to death might be a higher priority as far as they were concerned. He inferred that the people of the gurdwara were horrified by their plight (whatever that might be) and that they were being looked after. But word had it they’d come down out of the mountains. And Ranjit’s strange remark had turned Laks’s thoughts in that direction. So he went over and struck up a conversation with Ilham.

They were Uighurs from western China. After a long train of persecutions, their father, an engineer, had been rounded up and sent to a concentration camp (Ilham’s phrasing, which Laks construed as Ilham not knowing English very well until Laks learned more). The father had not been heard from in a long time. The rest of the family had fled, and—wisely—kept fleeing, until they had fallen in with some Tibetans who knew how to get across the LAC, and ended up here in Chandigarh.

That was the short version of a tale that, it could be guessed, was epic. Ilham looked willing to disgorge the longer version at minimal provocation. What prevented this was Laks’s basic lack of knowledge about Uighurs, Xinjiang, Chinese policies toward same, and other foundational elements of the story. This was clearly startling to Ilham. He didn’t know where to begin. “Don’t you even have Internet?” was the best he could muster. A lesser man than Ilham would have been offended by how little Laks knew of these matters. Ilham was just bewildered. “SMH,” he said. “SMH.” Laks had to go look it up. It meant “shaking my head.”

Of course Laks had Internet, but it was just slow enough to be annoying, so he went to a teahouse where it was better and spent a while getting up to speed on the Uighurs and (as it turned out) the incredibly sinister things being done to them by China. This branched into a whole additional freight train of browser tabs relating to similar persecutions of the people of Tibet. Tibetans were Buddhists and Uighurs were Muslims, but anyway they were both religious/ethnic minorities that China had decided needed to be assimilated, even to the point of telling parents what they were and weren’t allowed to name their children, and what styles of beard were and were not acceptable on adult males.

These details really struck home to Laks in a way that more conventional atrocities wouldn’t have. Sikhs practiced the least dogmatic, least pompous, least priest-ridden religion that could still be called a religion; but they were awfully particular about names and beards.

He remembered the oil cans on Uncle Dharmender’s chessboard in Kamloops. How small the rook seemed in comparison. Usually India and Pakistan were what his people worried about. But it had been centuries since any Muslim or Hindu government had tried to tell them how they were allowed to wear their beards. China was thought of as farther away, safely walled off by the world’s largest mountain range, and basically not interested in bothering Sikhs. But yet a third collection of browser tabs testified to Laks’s research on the topic of the Line of Actual Control, and this made it very clear that China was gradually, meter by meter, pushing the border south. They were claiming land that was new in the sense that, until the last few decades, it had been buried under glaciers for all of recorded history. But now every year the glaciers retreated, sometimes exposing tens of meters of bare rock over the course of a single year. And when you multiplied that by a bunch of years and by the convoluted length of the glaciers’ front, you were talking about a lot of land that effectively had not existed until recently. Cold, barren land without enough oxygen, to be sure. But one side or another—India or China—had to claim it. There was an official border on the map, but it had always been meaningless. All that mattered was the Line of Actual Control.

The last factor in Laks’s decision was already a foregone conclusion, even if he had not admitted it to himself until now. He was done with the Punjab, and it was done with him. He’d come here expecting a martial arts epiphany, just like in the videos. Instead he had found a system of values and a sanely ordered society, with a well-developed immune system that was gradually rejecting him. Sort of in the way that if you got a deep splinter in your flesh, and waited long enough, the body would find a way to wall it off and force it out. The graybeards had perceived things about Laks that he himself had only figured out at length by blundering up blind alleys. They had noticed in him a want of miri piri, which meant a coherence of the mind and the body—a physical/spiritual harmony, the development of which was the true purpose of gatka, or any other religious practice for that matter.

Once Laks had made up his mind, though, and explained his plan to Ranjit, everything magically got better and easier. He had stumbled across miri piri, or at least the trailhead of the path that might lead him to it. People who had been worried about him were visibly relieved. Somewhat contradicting his earlier statements, Ranjit managed to summon some young stick fighters who were pretty good at it and who were not afraid to spar at something like full contact. Not so much with the high-powered strikes Laks had borrowed from other arts. Those were best practiced against inanimate objects. More so with the pure gatka moves. Supposedly these were suited for defense against multiple attackers closing in from all sides. They were able to test that in simulated combat, and it ended up being a good news/bad news outcome. Defending against multiple attackers was really difficult even if you had learned the techniques; but a little bit of realistic practice went a long way in bettering one’s odds.

The aerobic burden was impressive even at Chandigarh’s altitude of a mere three hundred meters above sea level. This gave Laks fair warning that he would have to work on his cardio. Without supplying a very clear explanation as to why, he got his mother in Richmond to express-ship him a high-tech training contraption made just for this purpose: a face mask attached to a breathing tube that ran through an oxygen-absorbing apparatus on your back. It looked like something from a science fiction movie and it drew a lot of stares from the lads on the adjoining cricket oval, but it enabled him to breathe air in Chandigarh that was as oxygen-starved as that at the Line of Actual Control, which was at more than ten times the altitude.

He had come to India to help people get oxygen. Now he was learning to get along without it. The contraption turned out to be a recruiting tool. He couldn’t wear it 24/7. Gopinder, one of his training partners, requested permission to try it out. Laks readily assented. If nothing else this gave him an opportunity to see what it was like fighting an opponent who didn’t have enough oxygen. The answer was that he fought surprisingly well until he had an opportunity to think about it.

It turned out that Gopinder was into kabaddi. Laks had been aware of the existence of this sport for a long time, but only because his uncles were wont to keep live feeds of it running in their gas stations in the evenings, when it was morning in the Punjab. It was militarized tag, basically. There was no equipment. It was played in a field with a line drawn across the middle. Each round—which was called a “raid”—consisted of a single attacker from one team squaring off against a squad of four defenders from the opposing side. The attacker started at the midline. The defenders linked arms to form a sort of moving wall that generally stayed as deep as possible in their end of the field. At the start of the raid, the attacker advanced across the line and attempted to tag as many defenders as possible in the time available before retreating back across the line. As soon as any defender got tagged, though, they would break free from the line and try to detain the attacker by grappling with him, to prevent the attacker from returning “home” before time ran out.

In a modern implementation, time would have been kept track of by a referee with a stopwatch who would blow the whistle after sixty seconds or whatever. But kabaddi was a lot older than stopwatches, or the concept of referees for that matter, and so they kept time in a different way: the attacker was not allowed to breathe. As soon as he stepped across the line he would begin to chant “kabaddi kabaddi.” As soon as he stopped, the raid was over. If he’d made it back across the line after tagging someone, points were scored, but if he’d run out of oxygen—for example because he’d got pulled into a wrestling match—the raid failed.

As with seemingly every other sport, there were leagues and age brackets and rankings and uniforms and endorsements and all the rest. Punjabi kids played it all the time, in the way that suburban West Coast kids played soccer, but it was also popular in other parts of India. Gopinder had been playing kabaddi since childhood. Indeed, this was how he’d gotten involved in gatka, for you could think of gatka and kabaddi as both belonging to a constellation of “Sikh pastimes derived from martial origins” and it was common to see sports festivals and tournaments where demonstrations of gatka alternated on the same field with rounds of kabaddi, all announced with lung-bursting enthusiasm through the same radically overdriven sound system. Anyway, Gopinder was pretty good at kabaddi and belonged to an adult league team in Chandigarh. He had invited Laks to attend some of the competitions and even to try out for the team, but this was not the right time for Laks to take up an entirely new sport.

As you would expect, people who were serious about kabaddi spent a lot of time holding their breath and were good at dealing with hypoxia. So of course Gopinder was fascinated by the breathing apparatus. During their early experiments on the field, Gopinder was, of course, better able to cope with its effects than Laks.

“Adrenaline will take you a long way!” was the verdict of a completely random boy in cricket whites who had wandered over to observe. On second glance, maybe “young man” was how most people would describe this fellow; he was a junior coach, or something. Tall and athletic enough that he felt completely unafraid to stroll over and bother the warlike Punjabis. Or maybe he felt that the cricket bat in his hand would keep him safe. He introduced himself as Ravi. Laks startled him, not necessarily in a bad way, by responding in fluent English. Once they had got through the preliminaries, Ravi just asked, straight out, “Are you training to fight up at the Line?” Laks had to admit that they were, since it seemed just idiotic to deny it. There was a certain amount of basic honesty and righteousness that went with striving toward miri piri. Ravi grinned and told him that it was “cool” that this was so. Laks assumed at first that Ravi was a rich boy, since he had that kind of self-assured nature, but on second thought he wouldn’t be working as a junior coach if that were the case.

Ravi kept coming over as days went on. He put on the breathing apparatus and went for a jog around the cricket oval and nearly fell over dead. He asked detailed questions about stick fighting and whether any of the techniques would work with a cricket bat.

At the same time as all this, Laks was laying in a stock of good rattan. This was a better material than bamboo for actual, as opposed to simulated, fighting. It was heavier and more solid. When it broke, which was rarely (you could bend it nearly in half if you were strong enough), it split into a sort of stiff broomlike structure instead of just creasing and buckling like bamboo. It was a bit exotic—the best stuff came from Southeast Asia—but not that hard to obtain once he had put his mind to it.

He invested in a clever little camping saw, small enough to be folded up and slipped into a backpack, and some other simple woodworking necessaries: scraps of sandpaper, a little pocketknife, a whetstone. Ranjit turned out to know a leatherworker—a profession that Hindus tended to avoid but that was perfectly acceptable to persons of their faith. This fellow knew how to stitch leather coverings for the sticks. These were not absolutely necessary, but they were an improvement over naked rattan. At his suggestion needles, punches, and stout waxed thread made their way into Laks’s kit.

Once he’d broken the nasty habit of splurging on Marriotts in Amritsar, he’d husbanded his money carefully. But now that a clear end to his journey was in sight he spent some on warm clothing and a few other items that might come in handy at the Roof of the World.

The time of his departure could hardly be kept secret from the community of the gurdwara, since he had accepted the offer of a ride to Shimla from Jasmit, a truck driver who happened to be headed that way, and Jasmit was nothing if not talkative. They were supposed to get underway at six o’clock in the morning. Inevitable delays and friction pushed that back to eight. The point of departure was an alleyway that ran behind the gurdwara and served, among other uses, as an informal loading dock for the kitchen. A surprising number of now familiar faces were there to see him off. Laks trudged up the alley bent under a fully loaded backpack and carrying a long bundle of rattan sticks. Or at least that was the case until the weight was lifted from his hand by one who had fallen in step beside him. He looked up in surprise to see Gopinder, his sparring partner, shouldering a duffel bag. He was dressed in what passed for warm clothing in Chandigarh but was probably a one-way ticket to hypothermic shock where Laks was going. “I can carry part of that load, brother,” he said, taking the stick bundle in his free hand.

This should not have been such a total surprise. Gopinder had put himself through a lot of physical discomfort training in that breathing rig and was at least as altitude-adapted as Laks. But it caused Laks to start crying with astonishing suddenness. Blurry then was his view of the Uighur family, awaiting him by the kitchen’s back door. He hadn’t seen them in a couple of weeks. They’d been adopted by a local mosque that had evidently been looking after them well. They looked healthier. Ilham seemed to have grown three inches and put on fifty pounds. He was wearing a Kullu cap—a cylindrical hat of heavy wool, common where Laks was going. Laks assumed it was just a symbolic gesture until Ilham hauled a bag—smaller by far than that of Laks or Gopinder—out of the car that had brought them here and commenced a long series of farewells to his mother, granny, and siblings.

Laks was just pulling himself together when Ravi came striding up the alley. His rolling suitcase, designed for polished airport floors, kept trying to jerk his shoulder out of its socket as its cheap skateboard wheels snagged on breaks in the pavement. He had shoulder-holstered his cricket bat so that its handle projected up behind his head, making him look (as he was no doubt well aware) like a character in a movie. “I have never seen the mountains,” he explained, “except from a great distance. I thought, what could be the harm in accompanying you at least part of the way?”

The truck of Jasmit was relatively small, consisting of a cab over the engine and a flatbed extending out over the rear wheels. Usually this was walled in by a steel frame to make it a sort of well-ventilated restraint system for cargo. Panels and tarps could be instated over that to protect from the elements, but they were entering the spell of clear weather after the monsoon and so none of that was necessary today. On big highways in more densely populated parts of India this would have been one of the smaller vehicles on the road. A large one, though, would have been hard pressed to negotiate the road up to Shimla. For as soon as they got out of Chandigarh’s eastern suburbs, Jasmit was obliged to downshift as the engine began to labor uphill. The formerly straight road became an interminable series of zigzags, with little zigzags superimposed on big ones. They were ascending into the foothills of the Himalayas. They stayed as far to the left as they could to allow impatient cars to veer past them with tooting horns. But before long this ceased to be an issue as the whole road became packed solid with a traffic jam of mysterious origin. Roadside dhabas clung with increasing tenacity to the lips of increasingly high and sheer retaining walls. In traditional usage “dhaba” would mean a teahouse, and if you looked around in sufficiently remote places you could still find ones as rustic as this implied. Most of them, though, had evolved into convenience stores, as visually riotous as might be expected. On an open road the passengers would have been blown to tatters, shouting at each other the whole way, but here the wind of passage, when they were moving at all, was little more than a light mountain breeze.

Ilham hadn’t bothered to explain himself yet, but now he did. “You have no idea what you’re getting into,” he said. “I am not much of a fighter. But if I learned one thing from watching the Chinese, it’s that you need several people to think about logistics for every man who is carrying a weapon.” His eyes strayed to Laks’s leather-covered stick. “So I thought it might help you to have at least one such person in your group—what is the word you use? San-something?”

“Oh, the word you are probably thinking of is sangat,” Laks said. “It usually means a fellowship of sants. Not really the right—”

“Sangat. Yes, that’s the word.”

“It is really more of a religious connotation,” Laks protested. “Sometimes, it’s true, in old war stories they use that word to mean a column of saint-soldiers on the move, but it’s a little inappropriate . . .”

“Like the Fellowship of the Ring,” Ilham said, nodding solemnly. It wasn’t his first foray into weird pop culture references. The hostels and dhabas of the high mountain trekking corridors tended to sport communal TV-watching parlors stocked with a diverse but absurdly random selection of DVDs left behind by previous guests.

“Fair enough,” Laks said. “And by joining my sangat you are like my bhai, my brother, now, and the same goes for you, Gopinder, and you, Ravi.”

Ilham signaled his approval by running his hand up the back of his neck and cocking his Kullu hat forward at a rakish and stylish angle. Then he squinted into the hazy sun rising above the white Himalayas.