Wednesday September 21, 2016. That day my life gave me a good blow. He tapped into my most innate emotions and showed me how unexpected life can be.

Maybe if he had arrived earlier, maybe if he had called him, maybe if it hadn’t rained. All those thoughts jumped around in my mind. Every day I walked a short distance from my house to my math tuition. It was a cozy little room with what seemed like hundreds of books and a variety of odd and interesting objects, which somehow accommodated four tables and a few seats. In the middle of the room sat the most extraordinary person I have ever met.

He never liked being called sir, instead he asked us to call him “uncle”. He was a teacher in every sense of the word, teaching us not only math, physics, chemistry, accounting, and economics, but also the many twists and turns, the ups and downs of life. For the better part of 2 years I have known him and after these two years I find myself lost without him. Where everyone saw an abomination, scum so to speak, he saw a lost but innocent soul. More than just telling me about my problem, he took an active interest in solving it. After a long day of taking notes and solving additions, he expected to spend 3 more hours taking notes and solving additions. Why? Uncle. Nobody could give me what he did, inspiration. In everything he did he managed to inspire us, whether it was his days in the army, his relationship with his children, who are doctors but can teach you calculus in three hours, or just a casual epiphany he had last night. My only regret is that I never actually told him what a bad student he had been. I regretted it when he did poorly on the math test. I had no regrets when I didn’t get into that university I always wanted to go to, even after which he still promised to help me so that next year the sun would really shine on me. I regretted it the day I found him dead in the basement.

A walk down the street is the uncle’s house, where his wife, whom we originally just called aunt, had her beauty salon, and across the street, the entrance to the basement of the boat that was our happy little license plate. That day he was going to take a comprehensive test. I was a little late so I was preparing my excuse on the way. So excited, I headed to the license plate. Upon arrival I see the door ajar. Now here’s the thing, since the license plate is the basement room, you can only see the top of the door from the path. Approaching the door I see that the license plate is flooded. No trace of the uncle. A couple of chairs sat upside down near the entrance. I also saw a motorized pump resting next to the stairs and thought, “he must have been trying to drain the room.” Another step forward and horror struck. Beneath those same chairs I saw the torso of my teacher. I hurried into the room, stepped into the water, and was instantly greeted with a shock, literally. I knocked over the chairs and saw him clinging to a corded socket, facing ankle-deep water. I immediately went for the plug in his hand upon touching it, which greeted me with another shock. I took it from her hand and put it on the table. I picked him up and flipped him over and tried to resuscitate him all the while yelling his name. When a minute or more had passed since I entered, I ran to the living room and informed the aunt about what had happened. Soon there were a dozen people at the entrance to the room. We got him out of the room and waited for the requested ambulance, but time was of the essence. So we put him in the car with the aunt and some other people, and they went to the hospital, but I knew better. Even when they pulled him away, I saw his face, with lifeless eyes and an unchanging expression, I knew he had been dead for a long time. The salon staff, the security guards across the street, and just me left. They asked me to close the basement door, handing me the keys. With trembling hands and a hard-pressed mind, I closed the room, gathered up my slippers that had somehow broken in the process, and went home. I walked into an empty room and I cried, I cried until I lost my voice. After that I was silent. It was only at midnight, when my parents were really worried about me, that I recounted the tragedy. That night I did not sleep. I kept thinking about what could have been. If only he had come earlier, if he had maybe called him before he came, could he have saved him? Even the aunt and staff claimed to have heard a loud band but never suspected anything so gloomy.

I also sat wondering, why were his glasses intact? The only plausible explanation was that he was still alive for some time before he died. The current paralyzed him, but if that didn’t kill him, the water surely did. Until dawn I cried and blamed myself. Over time I understood that it was not for me to grant or take life. The next morning, I went to the house and expressed my condolences to her aunt and her son, who had been flown to Hyderabad with an emergency notice. Everyone who came was all talk about me. How I got the lace out of the water, preventing more casualties, how I had this presence of mind, giving him CPR, straightening him out and everything else. With each passing second, he found this praise more and more stupid. What good is bravery if it doesn’t save the only life that really mattered to me? After some persuasion from family members and my mother, I returned home. Before going, I asked them to contact the students who came and tell them what had happened, since I and only a few others who were out of town knew about the incident.

The next day, around 4:00 pm in the afternoon, the extraordinary man, Colonel Charanjit Singh Arora, our dear uncle, was cremated. How much irony here!! He passes away a few days after a granddaughter was born to him. He showed me all his articles from here from the first and he is not even here to see mine first. He always told us that his time is near, maybe in 10 years. But here’s the thing, we may have prepared for when the time comes, but we never expect it to be 10 days. Under his guidance, we had all flourished in one way or another, always learning something new and improving on the old. Even in his death he had taught me a lesson, “to always take care and live life with satisfaction.” For the next 30 years of my life I don’t know what I’m going to do, but after that, I want to be a teacher, so I can one day become someone’s “uncle”.