He’d been swinging the big stick—the gada—almost from Day One. Usually translated into English as “mace,” this was a rock weighing as much as a hundred pounds, but usually less, on a long frail-looking handle. Some of the ones here looked like artifacts from the Paleolithic section of a museum, others had been fabricated ten minutes ago out of rebar and concrete. There was nothing to object to in Laks’s working out with these, as long as he did it safely; it was the Indian equivalent of standing in the corner of an LA Fitness doing dumbbell curls.
Gada could also be translated as something like “club” or “large stick.” The diminutive form of the word, gatka, denoted a smaller stick, unweighted, just a piece of bamboo or rattan maybe a meter long. Maybe longer, maybe shorter—it didn’t pay, in stick-based martial arts, to be pedantic about the exact length.
Some thought of this as a mere standin or practice implement for a sword. And indeed, senior practitioners of gatka, as this martial art was called, could be seen practicing with actual swords. But at the end of the day the name of the martial art was literally “Stick” and its students spent most of their time swinging blunt bamboo, not sharp steel. While acknowledging the romance and charisma of swords, Laks had always been perfectly content with stickwork, seeing it as something that might actually be useful in a practical situation—a junkie fight in downtown Vancouver, say. He had learned gatka from a very good teacher in Richmond （though with the perspective of seven thousand miles’ distance he had twigged to the fact that this man was an outlier who, here, might have been viewed as eccentric or insane—sometimes there was a reason why people emigrated—but he’d been a great teacher for Laks）。 As a boy he had practiced it with pine branches up in the Rockies while killing time along high tributaries of the Fraser and the Columbia, waiting for his father to show up and fetch him. He had even practiced it in his Marriott and Radisson and Wyndham rooms here in Amritsar, with curtains drawn.
So what it boiled down to was that he was already more proficient—much more proficient—at gatka than even the most senior men of this akhara. The graybeards told him straight out that they did not feel they had anything to teach Laks. He was barking up the wrong tree. Which he realized was a euphemistic way of saying that Laks was becoming sort of a problem. Embarrassing the senior guys. Making them look bad. Becoming a folk hero to those little boys he towed around on the log. A solution needed to be found. The people who ran the akhara were reasonable men. Not assholes. At the very least they needed to have a story they could tell to the youngsters when Laks suddenly stopped showing up.
So inquiries had been made and they had got in touch with one Ranjit, an instructor in Chandigarh, a real wizard with the stick, who would not object to having Laks around. This could be explained to Laks’s junior fan club as a kind of graduation. Their budding role model was being kicked upstairs where he could be admired from a distance, and cherished in memory.
HOUSTON
Willem and Jules made their way up into New Orleans and turned west on Interstate 10. Now they were running parallel to the track of the hurricane. For a few hours, the drive went more or less as the nav system had envisioned it. Then Willem almost got them killed when he failed to notice stopped traffic on the highway ahead until it was nearly too late and had to stand on the brakes and make a controlled diversion onto the shoulder.
They swapped drivers at that point. Technically Jules wasn’t supposed to drive this thing. But Willem reckoned that working something out with the rental company would be easy compared to the complications of the jet crash. Anyway, it was less risky than his continuing to drive. He leaned the passenger seat back and fell asleep to the faint accompaniment of country music from the truck’s radio.
When he woke up, it was shortly before daybreak. Jules had been driving through the night in stop-and-go traffic. He had long since exited the jam-packed interstate and was feeling his way across southeast Texas on two-lane roads, following suggestions texted to him by the Boskeys’ swarm of cars, trucks, RVs, and watercraft.
It took them most of the day to circumvent Greater Houston and zero in on the caravan, which had stopped near a state park along the Brazos about seventy miles west of Houston. Here the entire group meant to form up, preparing to make its push into the flooded city at first light. The hurricane had devolved into a tropical depression that had squatted over the countryside south of Houston for a couple of days and dumped close to a meter of rain on it. The Brazos watershed, which lay mostly to the north, had escaped the brunt of this, but still the river was running high.