Anyway, they didn’t really know what to do with Laks either. It didn’t help that he was, to be honest, practicing a somewhat impure form of the art. It turned out that there were a lot of other people in the world besides Punjabis who knew a thing or two about fighting with the ancient and ubiquitous weapon known as the stick. Growing up in Richmond he’d had access to schools of Filipino and Malaysian martial arts up in Vancouver as well as down across the border in Seattle. So mixed in with his traditional gatka moves—which he knew how to do very well—were foreign bits. Improvements or impurities depending on your point of view. Styles of movement that looked inscrutable, or just wrong, in the akhara.