For Hari - and Martin

Martin has asked me to say a few words about Hari. I wish I could say more about her life before Martin, before she came to the West. But in fact, like the majority of people in this room, that was how we knew her - Hari in London, Hari and Martin, together. This, then, is for them both. I remember my scepticism when Martin first told us about her. I used to tease him that the furthest he had gone in the effort to understand and encounter difference was Italy. I recall very clearly Catherine's and my first impression of her. I want to say that we responded immediately to her charm - except that I don't think of Hari as ever setting out to 'charm' anyone: rather, then we were drawn to her natural grace and extraordinary elegance. These photographs remind us that she was stunningly beautiful, as much in jeans as in black and silver: the blue-black hair, the pools of black light in her eyes, her slender frame, at once strong, tense - and fragile. More memorable, were the range of expressions that constantly played across her face, and the life, the mobility in them - Hari, smiling, Hari reflective, Hari teasing, Hari quizzical, above all, Hari laughing… I remember, at once, her straightness, her directness. Above all, I think of her enormous courage…

She had given up everything for Martin - her home, friends, family, a promising career. She had risked everything - taking her own life, as she always did, boldly in her own hands. Of course, she had Martin to support her. The extraordinary, passionate intensity of their relationship - something quite special, out of the ordinary - was evident to everyone they met. They radiated it. But in another sense, she was isolated and alone, in a strange, cold place. Martin was already a formed person, with a strong personality, a public position and his own world. She had everything still before her. She gave no voice to the anxieties and fears this must have produced, but one could read them, occasionally, in her face. We shared, in particular, at that time, those things which belong only to those people who have made the journey to England and the West from somewhere else: a wry amusement at the loveable peculiarities of the English; a disbelief that one could ever be quite so cold; a failure to understand why those intrepid hunter-gathers, once they reached the British Isles, hadn't recognised at once that civilised life could not be established in such an inhospitable climate, and turned back to warmer regions; above all, astonishment at the polite, understated nature of British racism. These were difficult days for her. Work was essential to her sense of self, and she was rightly confident, clever and ambitious: but it was clear that she would have to struggle hard to find the kind of job that matched her abilities; and that meant overcoming the innate racism and the tendency to 'closure' of her chosen profession. How extraordinary that, in Hong Kong, she should have experienced again - this time, in her Asia -- the reverse racism which some Cantonese feel for non-white Malaysian Indians. But, once she did find work, how rapidly she blossomed and flourished - making a wide range of friends, drawing such very different kinds of people towards her, making her distinctive mark on Martin's complicated world.

In recent days, Martin has often said that his life started when he met Hari in 1993. This makes sense to all those who know how profoundly and irrevocably she transformed him - an astonishing thing to happen to a man in his late forties. In another sense, of course, it cannot be quite like that. Martin had already lived a full life before he met Hari, and lived it with the energy and commitment which is characteristic of him, the quality we love so much about him. What is certainly true is that she more or less refashioned him completely from the inside, produced in him a new and different kind of person, a new kind of consciousness of life, and new way of feeling: someone who knew things he had never known before. To watch this process unfold was like seeing the lights come on, one after another, in the rooms of a dark and familiar building, watching it slowly light up from within. Hari was not solely responsible for his new found interest in Asia, which predated her: but she made him understand something about difference, about what the world looks like from a different place, which he would never have grasped without her. In that sense, his love affair with Asia and his love affair with Hari were - and are - part and parcel of a single experience.

I find it difficult at the moment, to focus Hari clearly in my mind - the impressions are strong but keep shifting. But I have had, in these last few terrible days, two strong reminders of her presence. First, when I saw Ravi again on Wednesday night - those deep, dark eyes, those eloquent eyebrows… And, of course, whenever I look at Martin and see the imprinting - like an indelible trace - she has left in him. Death cannot steal these away. For the moment, Hari, they will have to do.

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