Termination Shock

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?”