Termination Shock

He knew that this would be distressing to his mother and father, so he didn’t tell them until after most of the symptoms had abated. And he sweetened it with the news that he would now be traveling to Amritsar, in the Punjab, to spend a little time in the land that was to his people what the headwaters of the Fraser River, high in the Rockies, were to Chinook salmon.

It wasn’t until he got there that he learned the literal meaning of the word “Punjab”: Five Rivers. Coming to India and hearing all the languages and dialects had made him aware of words in a way that no amount of classroom instruction ever could have. This was project-based learning all over again. This time, however, the project was him trying to understand, and to make himself understood, in a place where many languages were spoken. He’d fancied his Punjabi was pretty good, but really it was just enough to get by. Native speakers in Amritsar had the disheartening habit of switching to English mid-conversation, thinking they were doing him a favor. So during the first few weeks of his sojourn in Amritsar he burned more of his savings than intended staying in Marriotts, Radissons, and Wyndhams, balming his intense homesickness by watching American television and eating room service hamburgers.

But Punjabi TV was only a channel click away from American. Gradually the language wormed its way into his brain. Some words were hardly different at all. “Sant” had a meaning different, but not terribly far off, from “Saint.” “Naam,” which was another very important word to Sikhs, was “Name.” The Punjab had been named Pentapotamia, Five Rivers, by Alexander the Great when he had tried and failed to conquer it. But the Persian “Panj” and the Greek “Pent” both meant “five” and if you followed both upstream to their origin in the lost language of the Aryans, they were the same word.

What really blew his mind, though, was his discovery—an incredibly belated discovery of what ought to have been obvious—that the same thing applied to his nickname. “Laka” in Punjabi, “Laks” in Hindi or Urdu, “Lox” in English, “Lachs” in German, and basically the same word in many other languages across Eurasia all meant exactly the same thing. The word had been coined by people who lived, before the beginning of history, in some place where catching salmon and smoking the meat was important to their survival. From there—probably around the Black Sea—they had spread out in all directions and taken the word with them.

But having a few similarities between languages was more confusing than having none at all. So it was a rocky first few weeks. More than once, while pumping away on an elliptical trainer in the fitness center of some Western-style hotel, Laks surfed to travel websites to check the price of a one-way ticket back to YVR.

Part of the difficulty was his self-consciousness whenever he stepped outside of the Western bubble. In Canada he’d been tall and muscular enough to be mistaken for a hockey or football player. Here he was a giant. More importantly, it was obvious that razor and scissors had been allowed to touch his beard and his hair. He had begun to grow them back out. But in the eyes of a random passerby on an Amritsar street he was neither fish nor fowl: a big, somewhat shaggy chap who could have originated from anywhere between Persia and the foothills of the Himalayas.

Other than that, however, he just wasn’t special here. Well over a hundred million people—three times the population of Canada—spoke Punjabi, and most of them spoke it better than him. He’d come to a place where everyone—shopkeepers, cops, lawyers, farmers, even criminals—belonged to the same religion. In Vancouver, being the only Sikh on the fishing boat or the only Sikh welder had made him stand out, for better or worse. Not here. He needed an identity beyond just that.

One morning, he slept later than he should have, and finally twitched his curtain open to let in a blade of sunlight that would force him not to go back to sleep. The sun happened to fall on his arm band, making the burnished steel gleam—except in one place, where he noticed a faint bloom of rust. This was so superficial that he was able to rub it off using a towel. But it seemed like an omen. He had chosen to make, and to wear, the big kara in part because it said something about his connection to the traditional martial arts of his people. Now it was getting rusty! What did that say about him?

He decided to do something about it beginning that day.

Louisiana

Willem drove down in a rented pickup truck and rendezvoused with the caravan during a pit stop at a bend in the river near College Station. He sat down with the queen inside a screen house that the Boskeys had pitched on a sandbar. They reviewed the various large and small affairs of the House of Orange.