Upon my return to Mauritius yesterday afternoon from a short mission to Addis Ababa , a friend of mine who works at the Duty Free shop at SSR International airport greeted me and in no time told me that you were in very bad shape at a clinic in Curepipe. My wife and I decided on the spot that we would make a stop at the clinic on the way home and spend some time with you.

At the reception of the clinic in question, I asked to see you. The nurse on duty respectfully directed us to the waiting room where soon after she joined us. I remained speechless for some time when she announced that you had departed from this world and gone to your last abode last Saturday.

Each one of us gets so engrossed in one?s own activities that one loses all sense of relationship. It is only during moments like this that we reminisce. It is true that we had not seen each other for quite a few years. But occasionally, memories of yesteryears do flash in my mind. Yesterday again, certain memories unfurled in front of me. When we met for the first time in the seventies, it was as colleagues at the then Economic Planning Unit. We were both Village Development Officers in the Rural Development Programme supported by the World Bank. We then met again at the Ministry of External Affairs, Tourism and Emigration when along with Vijay Joypaul, Parwiz Hossen, Ramesh Seereekissoon, Gerard Ignace, Gilberte Francois, Bye Muslim Dilmohammod, Rafic Janhangeer and Ashok Baichoo, we joined the Foreign Service as the first competition-based batch of Second Secretaries. Soon, except for Hossen and me, you and the others were given postings by Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam to the few missions that Mauritius maintained in those days. You were happy to be posted to the Mauritius Embassy in Brussels. Since then our professional paths hardly crossed except for the brief periods when I was on mission or we did a coincidental stint at the Ministry. I remember very well when you came to greet me at Dulles airport in Washington in 1985. You were then en poste at our embassy in Washington. Later on that day you came to see me at my hotel, the Ramada. I had a beer and you had a soda. You had given up drinking, you told me. When we next met it was at the Ministry. You were going through a very bad patch. Somehow or other things were not going on well for you at the Ministry. I did not know the cause but you were equally not one to unburden your woes and worries onto others. You had become a loner. By the time, in the 1990?s, when I had yet again been made the victim of political maneuverings, you had been asked to leave office. It was a sad episode. When I became Secretary For Foreign Affairs for the first time in 1993, I regretted your absence at the Ministry. Yours was a sharp and analytical mind that, I believe, would have been of immense contribution.

I do not think we met again except perfunctorily in New York during a reception. I had already moved to Addis Ababa. But I have always felt that you and the other regretted Ramesh had somehow been bypassed by life. In the immediate aftermath of independence both of you had stood up for certain principles and many of us belonging to the same generation harboured admiration for you both.I cannot claim to have been a friend of yours in the sense that friendship is commonly perceived to mean. But you were more than an acquaintance. Somehow, I feel life was not kind to you.

I am sorry to have missed you before you embarked on your last journey. Farewell Ramesh. Farewell my colleague.

Vijay S. Makhan 1 March, 2006.