Termination Shock

It happened one year that a lot of people in India went hungry, not for food, but for oxygen. A variant strain of COVID was sweeping across the country. Many were dying who might have lived if only they had been able to obtain supplemental oxygen. A gray market had emerged as desperate family members sought to obtain bottled oxygen in any way they could. Some gurdwaras had set up oxygen langars. These were improvised, frequently open-air facilities where oxygen flowed from steel bottles—the same ones used in the welding industry—into regulators and thence through networks of tubes to masks where suffering patients could obtain some relief. It was not the same standard of care as prevailed in ICUs, where patients were sedated and intubated, but it was enough to make a difference for patients who only needed a little assistance with breathing and who otherwise might have overwhelmed hospitals.

Laks’s father never stopped sending him links to articles about these oxygen langars—some of which were being directly supported by gurdwaras in the Vancouver area. Father was a gentle personality, a classic kid brother to Dharmender, who had effectively become the patriarch when grandfather had passed away too young. So it was sometimes difficult to make out what he was trying to say. But eventually Laks—with some prodding from his mother—put it together that he was being presented with an opportunity not just to help suffering people in India but to make his father feel better about the direction Laks had taken in life. The skills he had learned as a welder, relating to the handling of bottled gases, could be of direct use in one of these oxygen langars. He could go over there and help people; and in so doing he could re-connect with his religious faith.

He had never decisively fallen away from this, at least in his own mind, but he had cut his hair and stopped wearing a turban. Management of hair and turban had proved very inconvenient on fishing boats. Later, when he had become a welder, he had found that welding masks—whatever fine qualities they might have as industrial safety equipment—clearly had not been designed by people who put turbans on every morning. You could always figure out some way to make it work, but easier yet was just to ditch the turban altogether. Among young Sikhs he was hardly alone in adopting Western hairstyle and headgear. But he knew it hurt his father’s feelings. He had tried to make amends by making his own kara—the bracelet, typically made of iron or steel, that Sikhs traditionally wore on the right wrist. Supposedly it was a vestige of larger arm bands formerly worn by warriors to protect their wrists from sword cuts. You’d never know it to see some of the slim elegant karas worn by modern people. Laks, who had access to a full metalworking shop, designed his own kara, cutting the shape out of 12-gauge steel plate with a CNC plasma cutter and bending it to fit around his wrist just so. It was heavy metal, both in the literal sense and in its aesthetic, which owed as much to sword and sorcery video games as it did to traditional decorative arts of the Punjab.

He knew his parents appreciated the gesture. But what they really wanted was for him to go to India and volunteer in one of these oxygen langars for at least a few weeks. If the visit stretched out to a few months, and he came back with longer hair, a turban, and maybe a girlfriend, so much the better.

So he went over to India and he did that. At the time, the new variant of COVID was burning most intensely in Delhi, so for the first few weeks he didn’t venture far from the capital. He stayed in Western-style hotels and got about in taxis. He spent his days managing tanks, tubes, and regulators at three different oxygen langars that local gurdwaras—supported by financial contributions from around the world—had set up in open spaces near medical centers that were buckling under the strain of the pandemic. He avoided contact with the actual patients. This was partly to avoid contagion—he wasn’t sure whether his vaccinations would protect him from this variant. It was partly because he did not speak Hindi—just some Punjabi, which was part of the same family of languages but not close enough. But it was mostly because he lacked that personality trait, essential for health care workers, of being able to relate to sick people and their families without becoming overwhelmed. So when he wasn’t busy at the langar he was back at the hotel, working out in the fitness center or playing video games in his room. Despite that he came down with this new COVID, suffered a mild case, but lost his sense of smell.