By that point, day was beginning to break and it was threatening to get hot. A few of the senior members of the akhara had drifted in to perform their workouts before going off to their jobs. They looked at Laks quizzically. Some were friendly, and in a laconic way showed gratitude for his efforts. Some were standoffish. A couple of them might have been hostile. But he had expected that. They would see him as a potential rival. Every gym in the world had some of that. The best he could do was show humility and presume nothing.
He was not here to work out today. He was too tired anyway. The digging had exhausted his upper body and dragging the log had done his legs in. He hobbled back to his rooming house before it got too hot—for this was spring, before the monsoon, when it could get above 45 Celsius during the afternoon—and bathed and went back to bed.
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.