We are here to say goodbye to Hari, whom most of us (except, or course, her relatives and school friends) haven't known - couldn't have known - for more than a few years, for she never left the Malaysian peninsula until 1993, at the age of 26. That is why I have been asked to say a few worlds about her life before we knew her. This is for those present who have not read the obituaries written by Ian Hargreaves and myself, but the texts of these are also available if you want to read them later. So here, very briefly, are the basic facts about a short but remarkable life.

Harinder Veriah, daughter of Karam Singh and Harbans Kaur, was born to a Sikh family near Kuala Lumpur on the last day of 1966. Her socialist father, the youngest MP in the first Malaysian parliament, was absent from home for long periods, not least because he was held in detention for some years under the Securities Act. Her mother died when she was six. She was largely brought up, sometimes in economically difficult circumstances, by uncles and aunts. She went to an excellent secondary school, but she had no fulltime education after getting her A-levels until she spent a year in London in the 90s getting an LLM after some years of working her way through an external law degree of the University of London while earning extra money by teaching, followed by about 3 years junior experience in KL law firms. Then, in 1993, Martin and Hari met and the next year she moved to Europe. That is the time when most of us began to get to know her, including the eminent City law firm which took her on, first in London and then in the Hong Kong office. But Neil Fagan will say more about that side of her life.

What can I say? Sadness and death were the last things anyone would associate with Hari. What she had, and more than ever since the birth of the enchanting little Ravi, was a marvellous sense of the enjoyment that life could bring. From childhood she knew plenty about the tough sides of life, but give her half a chance and she marvelled at how wonderful life could be: with Martin, with Ravi, with friends. We shared her wonder. In fact, when this is over, what Marlene and I, and Andy and Kate will remember is not her end, but the last days of her life, most of which the seven of us spent together on holiday in Vietnam. Three couples, a baby, our guide whom nature had designed less for being a tourist guide than for his former career, as a MIG pilot in the Soviet and Vietnamese airforce, criss-crossing the land of North Vietnam in a minibus and its wonderful waters on motor-boats. And, in the case of Martin, Hari and Ravi in Hanoi, on pushbikes. We all had an absolutely superb time, sightseeing, marvelling, eating, shopping, making fun of each other, and of the Vietnam tourist authorities. On the long journeys we played games and made lists: what was the best thing about Vietnam? We all thought: the company. Hari said it was the best holiday of her life. I'll remember her forever with Martin and Ravi on the Vietnamese dragon figurehead of our ship sailing across Halong Bay. I wish I could have seen her in that slinky silk dress she ordered, the ones with the slit up the side which usually only the slim and gracious girls of Vietnam can wear with any street cred. Hari could.

But is one particular moment of happiness what should be remembered about a life? Yes and no. Yes, because the happiness Hari and Martin found together, and later as parents, is what transformed both their lives in ways neither had imagined. But no, because I don't think she would want to be remembered only like this. Hari was not just about the pursuit of happiness. She was a fighter. She had not accepted the life she had been born into but made her own - she was still making it, when death cut it short. That's what made her seem so much more mature than her 33 years. To do this she had to be, or to make herself, strong and tough and determined, to resist the temptation of passivity. Even on holiday she was, in her quiet way, a strength-giver, while she refused, wrongly, to make any concessions to her own physical limitations. She was a fighter and a changer of, at least, her world, though she refused to use the political vocabulary of older generations about it - even that of women's emancipation which she so plainly represented. She was a deeply impressive, even more: an inspiring human being and that is also what will be remembered.

The last time I saw Hari was when I went back into the ward at the Ruttonjee Hospital in Hong Kong with Martin to see her dead body. It is strange to think in our murderous and cruel times, how rarely people like us actually see a body immediately after death. Or a dead body at all, for that matter. She had died a little while before, and I was also at her bedside when they gave up the long attempt to get her heart to beat again and disconnected the pump. She looked small and still and eerily beautiful, and though Martin had closed her eyes, she still seemed to be looking out between her lids. I can't say goodbye to her, even as we are about to bury her physical body. Her memory refuses to go away, and I don't want it to.

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