Even though he often told me about the rough life he had lived in the squalid streets of Kolkata, it was hard to imagine that my father could be a violent man. He was five two, skinny and utterly laidback. No mischief that I perpetrated, at the immature age of nine, ever excited his temper. And what he did for a living was as far from fighting that you could think of: he taught in the languages department at a university.
He had grown up poor, educated himself, and worked his way into the professoriate. But all this had happened long before I was born. Ever since I could remember, he spent most of his time quietly wading amongst his books, whose subject matter, it seemed, could be anything in the world. There were only two things that were allowed to interfere with this activity. The first was when he would break his silence to discuss questions about language and grammar with my mother, when she came to see us on the weekends from her job in a city four hours away by train. The second was when he would putter around with the colored pens and the paper cutter that he always carried in his shirt pocket. These were the tools for implementing his real passion: writing plays.
In the evenings, while I tackled my homework, he would bring out double sheets of writing paper (this was the late seventies, so no computers; and there were no typewriters in the vernacular he was using) and then slice them in half with his paper cutter. The cutter had a yellow plastic casing and would make a rasping sound as he pushed the steel blade out. Once or twice when I picked the cutter up and tried to play with it, he took it gently from my hand and then made a few thrusts and cuts in the air. “This is how you use a knife,” he would say, each time packing the tool safely away from my reach. I would nod, doubting whether he really knewwhat he was talking about, and suspecting that he was actually just trying to separate me from the cutter. Then I would return to my homework. And he would go back to deploying his three pens, using ink of one color for the names of the characters in his play, a different one for the dialog, a third for the stage directions. As the plot developed, sometimes he would rise from his chair and pace the room.
“Writing,” he would confide in me, as if I understood him, “Is like distilling life.”
Once the play was written and revised, he would start holding rehearsals on campus. This would happen in the evenings, with the student members of the university theater club participating. There seemed to be no lack of takers for the parts in his plays. Looking back today, I could seesome of the students were far more serious about the make-believe roles my father gave them than about their own lives. It was as if real life and play-acting had switched places. I usually went along with him, sometimes scavenging a small role which needed a child or a dwarf, but mostly watching and being entertained from the sidelines. We would often return home quite late at night. He would warn me not to let my mother know about our nocturnal hours when she came to see us on the weekend.
On one such night, close to midnight, we were being taken home in a rickshaw. Like all the others I had seen in our city, this one had a driver’s single seat in front and a bench for two passengers in the back. I was on the left, my father sat on the right. It was a full moon, and road was empty. The driver was pedaling away at his own rhythm. My father was probably thinking about the play he was trying to direct. I was also in a reverie, partly because I was a child, and partly because the night was so beautiful. I was not yet old enough to know that in life beauty often comes accompanied by danger. Then I became aware of someone on a bicycle who had pulled up on father’s side and was talking to him.
It was not hard to guess that the bicyclist was a young man, although a big scarf concealed all of his face except his eyes. He was steadying the handle of his bicycle with his right hand. In his left, he held a knife, whose substantial blade, just like the empty road ahead of us, gleamed silver in the moonlight.
“Give me the camera,” he said to my father, indicating the leather pouch resting between my father’s feet.
The young man must have been a student, who happened to be inside the auditorium and had taken note when my father was snapping photographs of the dry runs of the play. Now, with decades of hindsight, and even though armed with an upper-level belt in karate, I am pretty sure if it had been me I would have handed the camera over. Who knows what could have happened? I don’t know how it feels like to be stabbed in a fight, but I like to think I came close to realizing it, in my forties, when I had surgery to have my gall bladder removed. I woke up from the anesthetic screaming because they did not have me hooked up to the painkillers. “You had a cough,” explained the smooth-faced surgeon who came around to my bed once the nurses had begun administering Fentanyl to calm me down, “So if we had given you the narcotics before you became conscious that could have led to breathing problems. Maybe even a ventilator. That’s not something you want.” The pain had been exactly what you would have expected from beingstabbed in your stomach.
But on the moonlit road that night the words were not quite fully out of the young man’s mouth, when I heard a familiar rasping sound, as my father pulled the paper cutter from his shirt pocketand bared its blade.
“Why should I give you the camera?” he said to the man.
It took me a few years to understand that the fact he always carried the cutter in his pocket was not a coincidence, and still less a writer’s fad. It was a relic of his early upbringing in the streets of Kolkata. In fact, when he pulled the knife out, I don’t think my father was even thinking about what he was doing – there simply wasn’t enough time to think: the instincts of the days of his youth had taken over. The protocol in those days was that if someone pulled a knife on you, you pulled out yours. Then you negotiated.
The young man considered the situation for a moment. He had encountered unexpected - armed - resistance. He had probably been hoping to make off with the camera without too much incident. Now he found himself in a precarious position, able to guide his bicycle only with one arm, without which it would either crash into the rickshaw or go off the road, and faced, in any case, with the possibility that my father could kick him off balance at any moment. The man thought better of it and pedaled away quickly, my father yelling “Thief, thief!” behind him.
When we got home, my father put me to bed, inside the mosquito net, and went off to revising his script. I was left alone trying to fit life, which had suddenly become larger, back inside my head. When he returned to switch the lights off, and found my eyes still wide open from shock, he went and got me a book from his collection.
“Can’t sleep?’ he said, “Read this. And remember not to tell your mother about what happened.”
The book was called Secret Fighting Arts of the World. It was written by a man called John F. Gilbey. In the book, Gilbey described all kinds of self-defense techniques that he had collected from his extensive travels around the globe, seeking out reclusive experts who had spent lifetimes developing their arcane and vicious arts. These included defending yourself with controlled halitosis, implementing a touch that resulted in death after a delay, and strangulation as practiced by the infamous thuggees. That night, I read the book until I fell asleep, near dawn, from exhaustion. For many days, months and then years afterwards, I read and re-read that bookuntil I almost had it memorized by heart; I would often recite long passages from it to entertain my friends.
I myself treated the book very seriously. It gave me the idea that it was possible to defend oneself, and defend oneself well, in the face of attack. It ignited in me a visceral fascination with hand-to-hand combat. It suggested powerfully that incessant repetition of the correct techniquescould lead to invincible mastery of any fight situation.
In high school I boxed, read other martial arts books, and watched all the cult films. I learned about how Bruce Lee could terminate any physical confrontation within four seconds and how Ali never punched except to the face. In college, I watched with curiosity and envy as my roommate took lessons in kung fu; I was too busy trying to excel academically to go with him to the classes. Finally, when I came to graduate school in the United States, I got into karate.
******
Mateo, the big Puerto Rican from my upstate New York martial arts school (dojo), had agreed to practice sparring (kumite) with me outside of class. I was working on my front kick (mae geri) to the torso (jodan): the knee folds up to the chest, then the leg lashes out, the ball of the foot looking for the target, toes curled back. As with anything in life, there are pros and cons to kicking. Kicks can reach further and do more damage than punches, since legs are longer and stronger than arms. But unlike punching, kicking forces you to balance on one leg: a less stable situation.
Mateo was six two and I was five six. With his huge stride, whenever I stepped in and kicked, he slid back, just out of my reach. “You need to take two steps,” he said, “Otherwise you’ll never get to me.” I insisted on using just one, and even though I elongated it, he kept eluding me. A minute later, he started to repeat his advice, without showing any signs of losing patience. Before he had finished speaking, and without warning even to myself, I rushed in with two quick steps and felt my foot connecting below his solar plexus.
It’s a common saying in karate - perhaps also true in life - that the blows that hurt us the most are the ones we didn’t see coming. Surprise from the contact showed on Mateo’s face as he stumbled back. But although his eyes were watering from the hit, in a second he was up and smiling, and motioned for me to come over. “Bro, that’s what I’m talking about,” he said, high-fiving me with his long arm, “Bravo!”
We moved on to other exercises, with Mateo no longer disposed to giving me any lucky breaks. He swatted aside my attacks brutally with his blocks (uke), swiveled away from my roundhouse kicks (mawashi geri), and caught me snappily with his reverse punches (gyaku zuki) before I could back up from my techniques. I thought there were a couple of times that he suggestedphysically, without saying so, that he could have hurt me if he wanted to.
At the end of the practice session, still feeling bad about my kick - I should have controlled my distancing better; if tennis, as they say, is a game of inches, then karate is a sport of millimeters -and grateful for Mateo’s sparring time, I invited him out to a beer.
“Sure,” he said.
“How did you get into self-defense?” I asked him, once the drinks came out and we had relaxed a bit, “I can’t imagine a man of your size gets offered violence very often.”
“No,” he admitted, the calluses from punching the padded post (makiwara) showing on his knuckles as he picked up his glass, “Not very often. I am actually attracted to the strategies of karate. I find them very useful in my business negotiations. You know, like tai sabaki.”
He was talking about a karate technique that did not consider slipping an attack to be enough, and expected you to reposition yourself to advantage at the same time. I nodded.
“In the spirit of that technique,” he said with a smile, “Let me turn your question back on you: how did you become interested in karate?”
I told him about the story from my childhood with my father.
“You guys had a lucky escape,” he said after I had finished.
I nodded in assent. I wondered if Mateo would agree if I told him that in hindsight my father’s actions had been perfectly consistent with one of the central credos of karate - do not think of winning; think, rather, of not losing. In other words, he had practiced self-defense. Then I toldMateo about Gilbey’s book and its role in introducing me to the martial arts.
“I’ve read that book too,” said Mateo, “Very exciting.”
And then carefully: “You do know that it’s a fake?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“It’s completely fictional,” he said, “John Gilbey was actually an ex-marine and a CIA man. Hehad a lot of experience in the martial arts, and he was a good writer. His real name was Robert Smith.”
“You are messing with me,” I said.
At first I thought this was a tai sabaki that Mateo was pulling on me: in exchange for eating my kick earlier, he was now throwing me mentally. Like one of his business tricks. How was it possible that the book which had salved the trauma of my childhood misadventure, which had been my go-to when I needed physical confidence, which had been the starting point of my entire journey into the martial arts – was fake? Then I checked on my phone and found that what Mateo was claiming was absolutely correct*.
Smith had meant the book to be a subtle parody of the martial arts. But his exaggerations had been so tenable that when it was first published, people believed the stories in it (I did, and my friends did), and it became a spectacular success. Later, slowly, the truth had emerged. To his credit, Smith was the one who had come out with the confession.
“I don’t think it makes a difference, though,” said Mateo, as we got up, having finished ourdrinks, “In life we are permitted our illusions, as long as we use them for good. Which you did.”
That comment was fine in its place, but it did not answer the ultimate question that now arose in my mind: had my father known that the book was a fake, when he gave it to me? The question would never be answered, because by the time I met Mateo, my father had been felled by the blade that we call old age, wielded by the assassin that we call death.
* Secret Fighting Arts of the World by John G. Gilbey, Published by C. E. Tuttle Company (1963),
150 pages, ISBN 0804805156, 9780804805155.