Diplomat for difficult times, and a friend for all seasons

He had ceased to communicate about a year ago. By which I mean, he had stopped replying to mails and messages. This was uncharacteristic of PS Raghavan.

- Gopalkrishna Gandhi

Ambassador PS Raghavan, Indian Foreign Service, 1979, as he was properly described in formal parlance, had been a friend since the summer of 1992 — London being the place where we first met. [had just shown up at India House to set up its Nehru Centre in the High Commission's stately office-cum-residential building on South Audley Street. High commissioner LM Singhvi welcomed me with a warm embrace in his sumptuous room —which had a gleaming floor of polished wood on which one could slip, literally and metaphorically. No sooner was I seated in a green leather-bound chair facing him, he picked up his phone and asked the person he had called to join us. In a couple of minutes, a young officer stepped in, smiling with cautious amiability, and shook my hands with a warmth that said more than welcome. “Raghavan will introduce you to our colleagues and the Commission's working life,” Singhvi said. Raghavan did much more.

As we stepped out of Singhvi's office and into the entrails of that handsome old building, Raghavan switched to speaking in Tamil, the language we shared in our genes — while English was the language we had, with most urban Indians, adopted for all practical purposes. Inoticed that Raghavan spoke his Tamil with perfect ease anda certain style in which humour and sarcasm were as integral as tamarind is in rasam.

It transpired that Raghavan and Talmiz Ahmad, another colleague in India House, and their families were neighbours in the South Audley Street building that I and my wife were moving into. Raghavan and his wife Barbara, an amazing daughter of Poland who was now indistinguishable from India (specifically from Tamil Nadu), hosted us that evening to a homely dinner and a conversation that covered the gamut of the High Commission's work, its weaknesses and its challenges.