ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Time now for "My Unsung Hero," our series from the team at the Hidden Brain podcast. "My Unsung Hero" tells the stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else. Today's story comes from Surinder Gupta. One night in 1974, not long after the family moved to New Orleans, Gupta's baby son got very sick. Around 3 a.m., they piled into the car to get some medicine from a 24-hour pharmacy, and when they left the store, they were shocked to discover that their car was gone. Not knowing anyone else in town, Gupta found a phone book.
SURINDER GUPTA: And started going through some Indian surnames so that I could call somebody, so they might be able to come and help me out. Then I started looking at names called Singh and Walia and all of the common names from the state of Punjab. That's where we used to live in India, you know? And as luck would have it, the very first person that answered the phone was this person by the name of Walia. He was here from the same region that I was, spoke the same language, and that was very fortunate for us. So I told him the story and asked him if he could come and help me out at 3 o'clock in the morning, in the middle of winter, and he did not hesitate for a second.
And he was about 20 or 30 minutes away. He gets in the car and picks us up. He brings us to the apartment, and then our problems were over, you know? Everything was all taken care of, you know? As a matter of fact, I don't remember, but he may even have paid for the medicine. So he was a godsend for us at that particular point in time. That was our first knowledge of this man. Then slowly it turned into going to each other's houses, and over the years, we became best of friends, you know, families became best friends over the next 20 years.
So the story takes a twist. His brother had a son, and then we happen to have a daughter at the same time. So their paths kept crossing back and forth back and forth, till one day, both of those people were married.
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GUPTA: And the marriage, you know, produced two kids. One is 18 years old, and the younger one's 16. So this is from just looking at a drug store telephone book. So it's, like, become one family unit, you know?
SHAPIRO: Surinder Gupta of Lafayette, Louisiana, honoring his hero, Sukhdev Walia. You can find more stories of unsung heroes and learn how to submit your own at hiddenbrain.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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