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 stand-in 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.