Remembering Navin

The first time I really got to know Navin Narayan '99 was at Gutman Library, a few weeks into our first year at Harvard. Navin and I, along with our friend Sarah, were working on a Psychology 1 group assignment. Navin, who was also in my Social Analysis 10 section, arrived at Gutman with his customary one-half-liter bottle of water in hand.

We entered the library together, but Navin had to stop and explain to the guard that he needed to bring the water in for medical reasons. When we had settled in front of a computer terminal, Sarah asked Navin why he took the water everywhere he went.

Without hesitation, Navin told us he had had cancer, and had a problem producing saliva. He did not seem afraid or ashamed, or upset in the least. The tone of his voice was relaxed and stable, as if he were talking about any other experience he might have had as a teenager.

My mother had died of breast cancer when I was 13, and I arrived at Harvard still uncomfortable talking or even thinking about the disease. By contrast, Navin seemed almost too comfortable discussing his own battle with cancer--too comfortable for a topic that, to me at least, was usually surrounded by silence.

Soon I grew to discover more about Navin--about his remarkable role at the Red Cross, where he was the youngest national committee chair ever; his impressive work ethic, which seemed to make him always the most prepared person in section; even his ambivalence about how people should pronounce his name. (He liked NA-vin, but our Ec. 10 TF preferred the apparently more authentic na-VEEN.)

Above all, I discovered that Navin was nice. He listened carefully when you talked to him and always seemed genuinely content to be doing whatever he was doing. He was calm and warm, and I never saw him upset. If life was any harder for him than for the rest of us, he never let on.

Yet the fact is that I write this not as his best friend, or as someone who saw his pain and his triumphs up close. I didn't. I write this only as one of the many members of the Class of 1999, and one of many human beings, who were moved by Navin's life.

Navin's strength in the face of his illness was amazing. It couldn't have been easy to study so diligently--he graduated summa cum laude in Social Studies and was named a Rhodes Scholar-while fighting a terminal illness. As a friend wrote me in a succinct yet apt tribute on Wednesday, "Navin worked hard."

But if strength and hard work were two of Navin's defining characteristics, another was selflessness. Navin worked hard, but almost always, it seemed, he worked on behalf of others. For his senior thesis, Navin spent time collecting in India on the exploitation of child laborers.

I saw this side of Navin myself later in college, when I went to a meeting of the Harvard-Radcliffe Cancer Society. Navin, of course, had joined long before me, and was vice-president of the small group. But I noticed right away that Navin was not perceived in the room as a sufferer from cancer; he was perceived as a leader in an effort he had pioneered to help, tutor and befriend children living with the disease.

Navin finally succumbed to his illness on Monday in his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, at the age of 23. For those of us in the Class of 1999 who knew him, the news has been hard to handle.

It would be difficult under any circumstance to lose someone our age, about whom so many of us cared. But spread around the country and the world, it is even harder. We can only express our disbelief via e-mail, and console one another over the phone. We can't come together for a proper memorial.

Yet, in a way, the fact that so many of us in so many different places stopped to remember Navin is the greatest testament of all to a life well-lived. Navin was remembered with not one memorial service, but hundreds. Yesterday, I found Navin's Rhodes essay on the Web, at http://adams.student.harvard.edu/fellowships/Navins_winning_essay.htm. It is there as a model for other students aspiring to win the scholarship. But what it says provides a model for us all. "Tomorrow is never guaranteed," Navin wrote--four words he seemed to truly understand.

I will remember Navin as a friend and as a decent, strong and selfless person, who truly made the most of the time he had.

The world is going to need us to remember him. For as another friend put it this week, with Navin Narayan gone, all of us now have a little more work to do.

Geoffrey C. Upton '99 was co-editorial chair of The Crimson in 1998.