My favorite story of Kavi happened in Mrs. Antilla’s English class. We were told to consider the ethical paradox described in the classic thought experiment called “The Trolley Problem.”

The story is you happen upon a train track to which five people have been tied down to. A train is coming and will certainly kill all five people. There is no time to attempt to untie them. However, you are standing by a switch – a switch that will change the path of the train onto another track avoiding the five people who would otherwise die. The catch is that on the other track there is one person who is tied down.

Mrs. Antilla gravely looked around the room and asked, “So… is the correct decision to pull the switch, killing the one person who otherwise would have lived were it not for your intervention? Or should you leave yourself out of the equation entirely, allowing the tragedy to unfold as it would have had you not been around at all, ending with the death of five innocent people?”

“Kavi, what do you think?”

Kavi, nonplussed by the moral gravity of this tragic scenario leaned back on his chair, shrugged his shoulders and curtly responded, “Eh. Depends if they’re white.”

It’s hard to choose a single story. Plus, his parents could see this, and there’re things I wouldn’t want mine to know if the tables were turned – edit this as you’d feel appropriate. In the aggregate, let’s just say awesome, sometimes serendipitous things happened when you were around him.

There was Chicago, where I was a younger-than-usual intern with a bad fake ID (statue of limitations has to be up by now) that ended up working nowhere except the grocery store liquor aisle. And yet, my first week in the city, when I ditched the rest of my intern class to hang out because he was in town for Accenture training, it worked in line at Rockit Bar on West Hubbard.

There was Kabin bar, where we went for a comedy show. He was between apartments and crashing with a friend in Brookyln, so he had to leave early, but when Hannibal Burress showed up on stage for a surprise set, he blew off the curfew. He crashed on my couch, and in exchange, we both enjoyed a bit about Bill Cosby that’d blow up the Internet two weeks later.

But most importantly to me, there was my first real house party, which he invited me to (who does that? Invite a gawky, awkward, wide-eyed freshman to a house party?). There, he introduced me to lifelong friends, and gave me front row (lawn?) seats to two of those friends drunk boxing each other on Washtenaw. He handed me a pair of boxing gloves a minute later, with which I sparred his much-taller, much-stronger roommate, and the next morning, the liquor he’d soaked me in handed me my first five-alarm hangover. What he really handed me was a taste of what college could be, and a sample of the joie de vivre with which he approached life.