Nobody exactly knew when uncle Gupta came to Bhutan. Now of course the elders knew but nobody discussed uncle Gupta and i or my friends could never overcome the fear of asking about him hence we never knew much about him. But from amateur sources i learned that he had come to Thimphu long before i was born or in fact long before any of my friends were born.
Uncle Gupta was a man of very little words. He always wore the same shirt and the same pants and went to work with an umbrella in his hand- summer or winter. He seldom spoke to anyone. I heard he works in the bank, but what work, nobody knew.
He lived alone in the flat below ours, in the first floor. He would go to office in the morning and come back in the evening with a plastic full of stuffs which I assume were veggies.
There was nothing we knew about him except one thing: he was tired of his house being a favourite spot for burglars. The burglars had visited his house for three times in last one year. He hated this the most. And i could see it in his brown eyes. The burglars too seemed to be fun loving people for they would not take anything from his house. They would only toss and turn his belonging. Everything would on the floor. And nobody had ever seen someone entering or leaving his house. No one ever even heard a sound from his flat, yet it happened for third time in a year. So it was anyone's guess how stressed uncle Gupta was.
Now one night, for reasons we never knew why he was up, at around midnight Gupta saw from his bedroom that a man was climbing the sewage pipe and trying to reach out the veranda of the first floor of the opposite building. Just as he saw this he realised he was the sole witness to a burglary in happening. A voice deep within told him this man trying to climb the sewage pipe was the reason behind all his distress. His blood boiled up. He turned red with rage.
He rushed down to the ground floor and and saw that the man still climbing the pipe. He then picked up a fist-sized stone and shouted a " hey you!" And hurled the stone at him. At this point everyone in the neighbourhood woke up and came out.
The stone exactly hit the head of the man. And he fell down on the concrete ground below from the first floor with a loud thud.
Nobody knows clearly about what happened after that. In the ensuing days, it only turned out that the man wasn't a thief but he had actually lost the keys to his flat and was trying to climb up to his room silently without disturbing the neighbors at the pinnacle of the night.
