Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

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 fowclass="underline" 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.