Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

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.

But he sensed he was being used as an example of a big dumb guy. Every martial art had techniques for use against big dumb guys. It was difficult to practice them in earnest against a skilled wrestler of one’s own size. In Laks, they now had the perfect tackling dummy against which to practice anti-big-dumb-guy moves. So Laks ended up hitting the carefully groomed earth quite a bit and finding himself on the receiving end of various joint locks that, when they were done wrong, could hurt.

And it was not in his nature to accept this cheerfully. He was a martial artist for a reason. He had not traveled halfway around the world to the holy city of his ancestors and joined an ancient akhara just to get his ass kicked. Many were the days he limped home and watched old martial arts videos as a balm to his wounded feelings. The oldest trope of all was that the new guy had to patiently endure a period of humble apprenticeship and even outright suffering before emerging in the final reel as a transcendent ass-kicker. Of course, in movies that was all compressed into a training montage that lasted a few minutes, whereas Laks was having to actually experience it in real time, no fast-forward button available. For a while he just had to suck it up. But as time went on he began to resist, to make it a little more challenging for his training partners. If they complained, he would tell them in his gradually improving Punjabi that his only motive was to be honest, to make them better wrestlers. They could grumble, but not argue.

For a while he suffered from the heat, but finally in late June the monsoon came. He could cool off just by stepping out from under the canopy and being rained on.

So to that point no one would have dreamed of kicking him out of the akhara. He was sane, clean, humble, inoffensive, and useful. He could tow a boy-laden log across dirt like a bloody water buffalo. His social awkwardness was disarming in a way. No, the senior members of the akhara did not see anything to object to until Laks took up the stick.

He’d been swinging the big stick—the gada—almost from Day One. Usually translated into English as “mace,” this was a rock weighing as much as a hundred pounds, but usually less, on a long frail-looking handle. Some of the ones here looked like artifacts from the Paleolithic section of a museum, others had been fabricated ten minutes ago out of rebar and concrete. There was nothing to object to in Laks’s working out with these, as long as he did it safely; it was the Indian equivalent of standing in the corner of an LA Fitness doing dumbbell curls.

Gada could also be translated as something like “club” or “large stick.” The diminutive form of the word, gatka , denoted a smaller stick, unweighted, just a piece of bamboo or rattan maybe a meter long. Maybe longer, maybe shorter—it didn’t pay, in stick-based martial arts, to be pedantic about the exact length. Some thought of this as a mere stand-in or practice implement for a sword. And indeed, senior practitioners of gatka, as this martial art was called, could be seen practicing with actual swords. But at the end of the day the name of the martial art was literally “Stick” and its students spent most of their time swinging blunt bamboo, not sharp steel. While acknowledging the romance and charisma of swords, Laks had always been perfectly content with stickwork, seeing it as something that might actually be useful in a practical situation—a junkie fight in downtown Vancouver, say. He had learned gatka from a very good teacher in Richmond (though with the perspective of seven thousand miles’ distance he had twigged to the fact that this man was an outlier who, here, might have been viewed as eccentric or insane—sometimes there was a reason why people emigrated—but he’d been a great teacher for Laks). As a boy he had practiced it with pine branches up in the Rockies while killing time along high tributaries of the Fraser and the Columbia, waiting for his father to show up and fetch him. He had even practiced it in his Marriott and Radisson and Wyndham rooms here in Amritsar, with curtains drawn.

So what it boiled down to was that he was already more proficient— much more proficient—at gatka than even the most senior men of this akhara. The graybeards told him straight out that they did not feel they had anything to teach Laks. He was barking up the wrong tree. Which he realized was a euphemistic way of saying that Laks was becoming sort of a problem. Embarrassing the senior guys. Making them look bad. Becoming a folk hero to those little boys he towed around on the log. A solution needed to be found. The people who ran the akhara were reasonable men. Not assholes. At the very least they needed to have a story they could tell to the youngsters when Laks suddenly stopped showing up.

So inquiries had been made and they had got in touch with one Ranjit, an instructor in Chandigarh, a real wizard with the stick, who would not object to having Laks around. This could be explained to Laks’s junior fan club as a kind of graduation. Their budding role model was being kicked upstairs where he could be admired from a distance, and cherished in memory.

HOUSTON

Willem and Jules made their way up into New Orleans and turned west on Interstate 10. Now they were running parallel to the track of the hurricane. For a few hours, the drive went more or less as the nav system had envisioned it. Then Willem almost got them killed when he failed to notice stopped traffic on the highway ahead until it was nearly too late and had to stand on the brakes and make a controlled diversion onto the shoulder.

They swapped drivers at that point. Technically Jules wasn’t supposed to drive this thing. But Willem reckoned that working something out with the rental company would be easy compared to the complications of the jet crash. Anyway, it was less risky than his continuing to drive. He leaned the passenger seat back and fell asleep to the faint accompaniment of country music from the truck’s radio.