I set out below some thoughts on what one might say about Harinder. It is difficult to do justice to Harinder's spirited personality in words, but here goes.

I had the privilege of interviewing Harinder for a job at Lovell White Durrant in 1996. She was very keen to get into commercial work and although her legal practice hitherto could have been described as being fairly 'knockabout', she clearly showed the intellect and ambition to make one realise that it would be a transition she could make without too much difficulty. She struck me immediately as being lively, amusing, self-reliant, hard-working, ambitious, determined, dare I say beautiful also. As I came to know later, she was also clever, loving and loyal.

She had not had an easy life hitherto, her mother having died when she was six and her father having been a very prominent Malaysian politician who I suspect, although loving his family, did not have as much time as he would have liked to have spent with his family and my sense was that a lot of responsibility devolved to Harinder at an early age.

She worked her way through that and qualified at the Malaysian bar in October 1991. She practised law in Kuala Lumpur and in 1993 met Martin in what one can only describe as a fairytale romance. They were both in the same holiday party in Malaysia and seemed to have fallen for each other instantly. She married Martin and came to London in 1994, having by then obtained an external London University degree. She became LLM in September 1995.

I do not think she found it easy to settle in London and had had one or two jobs before joining Andersens for whom she left to join us in July 1996. She took her relevant transfer test and requalified as an English solicitor and then, to everyone's joy, she became pregnant and gave birth to Ravi, a most beautiful baby, in the summer of 1998.

By then Martin had the opportunity of working on a very serious project for the BBC in China and Hong Kong with a view to producing a book and a film and, to the sadness of those in the London office and in L1 in particular, she left to go to Hong Kong in November 1998.

Harinder's life should be an inspiration to us all. She never let her determination and self-reliance fall in the way of her consideration for others. She bubbled with life and vitality and it is deeply tragic that that liveliness should have been cut down at such an early age. She delighted us with her humour and her regular inability to get the punchline of a joke quite right.

She was grateful for the opportunities that she was given but it is, in the final analysis, we who should be grateful for the opportunity of having known her and loved her.

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