The last factor in Laks’s decision was already a foregone conclusion, even if he had not admitted it to himself until now. He was done with the Punjab, and it was done with him. He’d come here expecting a martial arts epiphany, just like in the videos. Instead he had found a system of values and a sanely ordered society, with a well-developed immune system that was gradually rejecting him. Sort of in the way that if you got a deep splinter in your flesh, and waited long enough, the body would find a way to wall it off and force it out. The graybeards had perceived things about Laks that he himself had only figured out at length by blundering up blind alleys. They had noticed in him a want of miri piri , which meant a coherence of the mind and the body—a physical/spiritual harmony, the development of which was the true purpose of gatka, or any other religious practice for that matter.