The word meant "door to the guru," which in some people’s minds conjured up a hokey image of an old holy man sitting cross-legged and spouting pithy wisdom. But they’d given up on gurus of that type hundreds of years ago, and put everything those guys had to say into a book. The book was the guru now. "Door to the body of written material serving in place of a human spiritual leader" was a bit of a mouthful and so the word was commonly translated into English as "temple." But this conjured up all manner of wrong ideas in the minds of Westerners, who tended to imagine something more in the Hindu or Roman Catholic vein. Sikhs didn’t have priests and they didn’t revere idols. So most gurdwaras, though they might have a few fancy decorative bits on the exterior, had more in common, on the inside, with Methodist church basements. Dining in the langar involved sitting on the floor in a long row of fellow diners, waiting as certain prayers were said, and then eating a simple vegetarian meal heavy on starches. Not that his people were vegetarians. But they wanted Hindus and Muslims to feel welcome without having to ask all kinds of questions about what animals were being eaten and how exactly they had been slaughtered. Feeling more self-conscious than he ever had in his life, Laks kept his eyes on his plate, ignored the stares that he assumed were coming at him from all directions, and refused to speak English.