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."