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.
He knew his parents appreciated the gesture. But what they really wanted was for him to go to India and volunteer in one of these oxygen langars for at least a few weeks. If the visit stretched out to a few months, and he came back with longer hair, a turban, and maybe a girlfriend, so much the better.
So he went over to India and he did that. At the time, the new variant of COVID was burning most intensely in Delhi, so for the
first few weeks he didn’t venture far from the capital. He stayed in Western-style hotels and got about in taxis. He spent his days managing tanks, tubes, and regulators at three different oxygen langars that local gurdwaras—supported by financial contributions from around the world—had set up in open spaces near medical centers that were buckling under the strain of the pandemic. He avoided contact with the actual patients. This was partly to avoid contagion—he wasn’t sure whether his vaccinations would protect him from this variant. It was partly because he did not speak Hindi—just some Punjabi, which was part of the same family of languages but not close enough. But it was mostly because he lacked that personality trait, essential for health care workers, of being able to relate to sick people and their families without becoming overwhelmed. So when he wasn’t busy at the langar he was back at the hotel, working out in the fitness center or playing video games in his room. Despite that he came down with this new COVID, suffered a mild case, but lost his sense of smell.
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.