Termination Shock

He’d heard that some of these things were quite old, but this one seemed beyond ancient. Oh, around the edges it did have accretions of new tech such as weight benches and barbells. But the core of it was a pit of loose earth, protected from rains by a roof on stilts. For it had been the practice in these parts for thousands of years that wrestlers used the earth as Western wrestlers used foam mats and Japanese used tatamis. That didn’t work unless the ground was prepared just so. Over time it would get tamped down hard by the probing feet and the thudding bodies of the athletes. Then it had to be refreshed. This work was performed daily.

Laks, at least, knew better than to waltz in during broad daylight. He set his alarm for five in the morning, laced on his trainers, ran to the akhara, and found that he was much too late. The next day he set the alarm for four but was late again. Three o’clock in the morning turned out to be the right time. He reached the akhara just as some of the younger boys were wandering in. He picked up an implement that looked somewhere between a hoe and an adze, hoisted it above his head, and drove its blade into the earth between his now bare feet. Then he pried it up to loosen soil that had been packed hard yesterday. Then again. Then again. All around him boys half his weight and age were doing likewise. For the first time since he had entered India, Laks lost track of time and just did something.

An hour’s hard labor sufficed to loosen all the earth. Now it was soft but uneven. The next step was to level it out and tamp it down, but not too much, by dragging weighted logs across it. The logs appeared to have been salvaged from the wreck of Noah’s Ark. The weights were the smaller boys; they stood on the logs three or four abreast, hanging on to each other and giggling, as Laks served in the role of draft animal, pulling them around the floor of the akhara until the ground was level, and firm enough to afford traction to the bare feet of the wrestlers but soft enough to cushion the impact of throws and takedowns.

By that point, day was beginning to break and it was threatening to get hot. A few of the senior members of the akhara had drifted in to perform their workouts before going off to their jobs. They looked at Laks quizzically. Some were friendly, and in a laconic way showed gratitude for his efforts. Some were standoffish. A couple of them might have been hostile. But he had expected that. They would see him as a potential rival. Every gym in the world had some of that. The best he could do was show humility and presume nothing.

He was not here to work out today. He was too tired anyway. The digging had exhausted his upper body and dragging the log had done his legs in. He hobbled back to his rooming house before it got too hot—for this was spring, before the monsoon, when it could get above 45 Celsius during the afternoon—and bathed and went back to bed.

After a week of doing that every day without anyone telling him to get lost, Laks dared to touch the equipment: the joris—what Westerners would call Indian clubs—and the gadas, which were like super-sized Indian clubs, a rock the size of a bowling ball on the end of a meter-long stick. These—or at least their modern, cast-steel equivalents—he had been working with since he had been a child. He knew perfectly well what to do with them. But the men of the akhara didn’t know that. So they all watched him out of the corners of their eyes, or in some cases openly glared, as he hefted them off the ground and swung them through the simplest and least hazardous movements, then reverently set them back in their places, put on his running shoes, and jogged home. The next day he did it again but he did it longer, working his way up to slightly heavier joris and gadas, and adding in some more challenging moves.

For this was Laks’s one and only trick. He was not that fluent in Punjabi, no matter how much time he spent watching Punjabi soap operas on TV. He did not have an easy smile. And yet he found that if he just kept showing up, nothing bad would happen, and gradually people would stop noticing him. And that—the simple comfort of not being noticed—was all he wanted.

After six months they kicked him out. They did it politely. His Punjabi had improved to the point where he could understand, even if he did not believe, the explanation given. It made sense in a way. He had continued showing up (a little later each day as familiarity gave him a kind of seniority) and staying a little later to do more and more advanced routines with heavier and more dangerous equipment. Some of the joris were studded with nails, imposing a penalty if you swung them wrong and let them touch your body. At the invitation of one of the younger adult members, he had entered the pit and done some wrestling. At wrestling he was merely okay. His size and strength just barely compensated for a lack of skill. So it wasn’t a complete wipeout.