My uncle Sardor left the medical institute in the middle of his third year, in 1999, and everybody in our family has an opinion about it.
My grandmother says it every autumn, quietly, when the admissions are in the news: "If he had finished, he would be a doctor now." She is right. He was the best in his year at anatomy and he has hands that do not shake.
He drives an ambulance instead. Twenty-one years, mostly nights, on roads that freeze from November.
He answers his mother with a different sentence, and I have heard it four or five times: "If I were the kind of man who can sit in one room for six years, I wouldn't have left in the third year."
Last February a boy of nine went through the ice on the reservoir near Bogʻishamol at twenty past three in the morning. His brother ran to the road and stopped the first thing that had lights.
The nearest hospital is nineteen minutes from that shore. Sardor did the first eleven of those minutes in the back of his own ambulance with the boy on the stretcher and a young nurse driving, and the boy's heart started again somewhere near the petrol station.
The boy is ten now. He came to our holiday table in March with his father, and he ate more than anybody.
My grandmother said her sentence again that evening, because she always does. Sardor put down his tea.
"If I had stayed at the institute, I would be a doctor now," he said. "That is true, ona. And if I were a doctor, I would have been asleep in Tashkent at three in the morning in February, and somebody else would have been on that road. Maybe a good man. Maybe nineteen minutes."
Nobody argued with him, which in our family is rare.
His own son is in his third year at that institute now. Sardor drove him to the door in September and did not go inside the building, and he has never explained why, and I have never asked him.