Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

HIMACHAL PRADESH

Perhaps it was coincidence. Or perhaps there was no such thing as a coincidence. But Laks’s conversation with Ranjit happened at around the same time as some other events that, like tributaries feeding into a river in the high mountains, all contributed their force to what happened next.

First of all it was September, which might seem like high summer, but it meant that the snows would begin soon, and if he wanted to get up to the Line of Actual Control, he needed to get moving.

Second: There was this family that had begun showing up at the langar attached to the gurdwara that Laks had been attending. They’d been literally starving the first time they wandered in. They would probably go back to starving if they skipped a day. They were decidedly not from around here. They were refugees who had come down out of the Himalayas on the back of a truck. But they had originated much farther north than that. They did not speak Hindi or Punjabi. Nor did they look like the kinds of people who would. Nor were they Tibetan. The group consisted of a mother, a granny, and four kids ranging from about five to fifteen years of age. The fifteen-year-old, a boy named Ilham, spoke English. Laks had seen them across the room but not bothered them, since it seemed that not starving to death might be a higher priority as far as they were concerned. He inferred that the people of the gurdwara were horrified by their plight (whatever that might be) and that they were being looked after. But word had it they’d come down out of the mountains. And Ranjit’s strange remark had turned Laks’s thoughts in that direction. So he went over and struck up a conversation with Ilham.

They were Uighurs from western China. After a long train of persecutions, their father, an engineer, had been rounded up and sent to a concentration camp (Ilham’s phrasing, which Laks construed as Ilham not knowing English very well until Laks learned more). The father had not been heard from in a long time. The rest of the family had fled, and—wisely—kept fleeing, until they had fallen in with some Tibetans who knew how to get across the LAC, and ended up here in Chandigarh.

That was the short version of a tale that, it could be guessed, was epic. Ilham looked willing to disgorge the longer version at minimal provocation. What prevented this was Laks’s basic lack of knowledge about Uighurs, Xinjiang, Chinese policies toward same, and other foundational elements of the story. This was clearly startling to Ilham. He didn’t know where to begin. “Don’t you even have Internet?” was the best he could muster. A lesser man than Ilham would have been offended by how little Laks knew of these matters. Ilham was just bewildered. “SMH,” he said. “SMH.” Laks had to go look it up. It meant “shaking my head.”

Of course Laks had Internet, but it was just slow enough to be annoying, so he went to a teahouse where it was better and spent a while getting up to speed on the Uighurs and (as it turned out) the incredibly sinister things being done to them by China. This branched into a whole additional freight train of browser tabs relating to similar persecutions of the people of Tibet. Tibetans were Buddhists and Uighurs were Muslims, but anyway they were both religious/ethnic minorities that China had decided needed to be assimilated, even to the point of telling parents what they were and weren’t allowed to name their children, and what styles of beard were and were not acceptable on adult males.

These details really struck home to Laks in a way that more conventional atrocities wouldn’t have. Sikhs practiced the least dogmatic, least pompous, least priest-ridden religion that could still be called a religion; but they were awfully particular about names and beards.

He remembered the oil cans on Uncle Dharmender’s chessboard in Kamloops. How small the rook seemed in comparison. Usually India and Pakistan were what his people worried about. But it had been centuries since any Muslim or Hindu government had tried to tell them how they were allowed to wear their beards. China was thought of as farther away, safely walled off by the world’s largest mountain range, and basically not interested in bothering Sikhs. But yet a third collection of browser tabs testified to Laks’s research on the topic of the Line of Actual Control, and this made it very clear that China was gradually, meter by meter, pushing the border south. They were claiming land that was new in the sense that, until the last few decades, it had been buried under glaciers for all of recorded history. But now every year the glaciers retreated, sometimes exposing tens of meters of bare rock over the course of a single year. And when you multiplied that by a bunch of years and by the convoluted length of the glaciers’ front, you were talking about a lot of land that effectively had not existed until recently. Cold, barren land without enough oxygen, to be sure. But one side or another—India or China—had to claim it. There was an official border on the map, but it had always been meaningless. All that mattered was the Line of Actual Control.

The last factor in Laks’s decision was already a foregone conclusion, even if he had not admitted it to himself until now. He was done with the Punjab, and it was done with him. He’d come here expecting a martial arts epiphany, just like in the videos. Instead he had found a system of values and a sanely ordered society, with a well-developed immune system that was gradually rejecting him. Sort of in the way that if you got a deep splinter in your flesh, and waited long enough, the body would find a way to wall it off and force it out. The graybeards had perceived things about Laks that he himself had only figured out at length by blundering up blind alleys. They had noticed in him a want of miri piri , which meant a coherence of the mind and the body—a physical/spiritual harmony, the development of which was the true purpose of gatka, or any other religious practice for that matter.

Once Laks had made up his mind, though, and explained his plan to Ranjit, everything magically got better and easier. He had stumbled across miri piri , or at least the trailhead of the path that might lead him to it. People who had been worried about him were visibly relieved. Somewhat contradicting his earlier statements, Ranjit managed to summon some young stick fighters who were pretty good at it and who were not afraid to spar at something like full contact. Not so much with the high-powered strikes Laks had borrowed from other arts. Those were best practiced against inanimate objects. More so with the pure gatka moves. Supposedly these were suited for defense against multiple attackers closing in from all sides. They were able to test that in simulated combat, and it ended up being a good news/bad news outcome. Defending against multiple attackers was really difficult even if you had learned the techniques; but a little bit of realistic practice went a long way in bettering one’s odds.

The aerobic burden was impressive even at Chandigarh’s altitude of a mere three hundred meters above sea level. This gave Laks fair warning that he would have to work on his cardio. Without supplying a very clear explanation as to why, he got his mother in Richmond to express-ship him a high-tech training contraption made just for this purpose: a face mask attached to a breathing tube that ran through an oxygen-absorbing apparatus on your back. It looked like something from a science fiction movie and it drew a lot of stares from the lads on the adjoining cricket oval, but it enabled him to breathe air in Chandigarh that was as oxygen-starved as that at the Line of Actual Control, which was at more than ten times the altitude.

He had come to India to help people get oxygen. Now he was learning to get along without it. The contraption turned out to be a recruiting tool. He couldn’t wear it 24/7. Gopinder, one of his training partners, requested permission to try it out. Laks readily assented. If nothing else this gave him an opportunity to see what it was like fighting an opponent who didn’t have enough oxygen. The answer was that he fought surprisingly well until he had an opportunity to think about it.