He had come to India to help people get oxygen. Now he was learning to get along without it. The contraption turned out to be a recruiting tool. He couldn’t wear it 24/7. Gopinder, one of his training partners, requested permission to try it out. Laks readily assented. If nothing else this gave him an opportunity to see what it was like fighting an opponent who didn’t have enough oxygen. The answer was that he fought surprisingly well until he had an opportunity to think about it.
It turned out that Gopinder was into kabaddi. Laks had been aware of the existence of this sport for a long time, but only because his uncles were wont to keep live feeds of it running in their gas stations in the evenings, when it was morning in the Punjab.
It was militarized tag, basically. There was no equipment. It was played in a field with a line drawn across the middle. Each round—which was called a “raid”—consisted of a single attacker from one team squaring off against a squad of four defenders from the opposing side. The attacker started at the midline. The defenders linked arms to form a sort of moving wall that generally stayed as deep as possible in their end of the field. At the start of the raid, the attacker advanced across the line and attempted to tag as many defenders as possible in the time available before retreating back across the line. As soon as any defender got tagged, though, they would break free from the line and try to detain the attacker by grappling with him, to prevent the attacker from returning “home” before time ran out.
In a modern implementation, time would have been kept track of by a referee with a stopwatch who would blow the whistle after sixty seconds or whatever. But kabaddi was a lot older than stopwatches, or the concept of referees for that matter, and so they kept time in a different way: the attacker was not allowed to breathe. As soon as he stepped across the line he would begin to chant “kabaddi kabaddi.” As soon as he stopped, the raid was over. If he’d made it back across the line after tagging someone, points were scored, but if he’d run out of oxygen—for example because he’d got pulled into a wrestling match—the raid failed.
As with seemingly every other sport, there were leagues and age brackets and rankings and uniforms and endorsements and all the rest. Punjabi kids played it all the time, in the way that suburban West Coast kids played soccer, but it was also popular in other parts of India. Gopinder had been playing kabaddi since childhood. Indeed, this was how he’d gotten involved in gatka, for you could think of gatka and kabaddi as both belonging to a constellation of “Sikh pastimes derived from martial origins” and it was common to see sports festivals and tournaments where demonstrations of gatka alternated on the same field with rounds of kabaddi, all announced with lung-bursting enthusiasm through the same radically overdriven sound system. Anyway, Gopinder was pretty good at kabaddi and belonged to an adult league team
in Chandigarh. He had invited Laks to attend some of the competitions and even to try out for the team, but this was not the right time for Laks to take up an entirely new sport.
As you would expect, people who were serious about kabaddi spent a lot of time holding their breath and were good at dealing with hypoxia. So of course Gopinder was fascinated by the breathing apparatus. During their early experiments on the field, Gopinder was, of course, better able to cope with its effects than Laks.
“Adrenaline will take you a long way!” was the verdict of a completely random boy in cricket whites who had wandered over to observe. On second glance, maybe “young man” was how most people would describe this fellow; he was a junior coach, or something. Tall and athletic enough that he felt completely unafraid to stroll over and bother the warlike Punjabis. Or maybe he felt that the cricket bat in his hand would keep him safe. He introduced himself as Ravi. Laks startled him, not necessarily in a bad way, by responding in fluent English. Once they had got through the preliminaries, Ravi just asked, straight out, “Are you training to fight up at the Line?” Laks had to admit that they were, since it seemed just idiotic to deny it. There was a certain amount of basic honesty and righteousness that went with striving toward miri piri. Ravi grinned and told him that it was “cool” that this was so. Laks assumed at first that Ravi was a rich boy, since he had that kind of self-assured nature, but on second thought he wouldn’t be working as a junior coach if that were the case.
Ravi kept coming over as days went on. He put on the breathing apparatus and went for a jog around the cricket oval and nearly fell over dead. He asked detailed questions about stick fighting and whether any of the techniques would work with a cricket bat.