Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

Father hid his disappointment well, but not perfectly. It was tough for him. He’d been the first in the family to earn a degree; grandfather had sent him to school so that he could pick up the skills needed to look after the books and handle certain legal affairs for the family business. Uncle Dharmender, on the other hand, took a more pragmatic view of how a young man such as Laks might make his way in the world. Without seeming to be overly judgmental he pointed out that working on fishing boats was dangerous, exhausting, and seasonal. Might it be just the lowest rung on a ladder?

If so, a next rung was within reach. Fishing vessels, like most other commercial ships, were made of steel, or sometimes aluminum. Repairs and improvements were made by cutting metal plates to shape using an oxyacetylene torch or a plasma cutter, then welding them together.

Laks learned how to weld. Uncle Dharmender encouraged him to take training courses and obtain the necessary certifications. By the time Laks’s high school classmates had made it out of college and entered the job market, he was already pulling down a solid income. He still worked on fishing boats when that was in season, but during the rest of the year he picked up welding jobs all over British Columbia and ranging into the oil sands of Alberta. The money was good. Laks had no loans to pay off, no dependents to support. He had all the time he wanted to go snowboarding in the mountains of British Columbia and to practice his martial art.

A foundational practice of Sikhism was the operation of langars: kitchens where any person of any religion, or no religion at all, could obtain a free meal merely by showing up at the appointed time. A typical langar operated on a fixed schedule and was based out of a gurdwara—a word usually translated as “temple” or “church.” From time to time, though, members of a gurdwara might set up a temporary, pop-up langar at the site of a disaster, or any place where a lot of people were going hungry for some reason.

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.