The other Pillay at the Geneva pharmacy

My closest encounter with Judge Navi Pillay took place in a Geneva pharmacy. She was not there.

We share a surname, and our first names are close enough to reward careful reading. We are certainly not related. Her achievements are entirely her own. My contribution to this story was needing medication.

From 1998 to 2002, I served as a South African commercial diplomat based in Bern. Work frequently took me to Geneva for trade and United Nations matters. The Swiss winters occasionally added a pharmacy visit to the programme, and my details duly found their way into the pharmacy’s records.

Years later, working for a multinational headquartered in Switzerland, I returned to Geneva to build trust with organisations including the World Health Organization. In the winter of 2009, a colleague from headquarters accompanied me to a local pharmacy in search of relief for my sinuses.

The pharmacist asked my surname.

“Pillay,” I replied.

As he entered my details, he asked whether I knew Judge Navi Pillay, the other Pillay registered at the pharmacy.

I knew of her, of course. But there was no personal connection to report.

In Durban, the surname Pillay is unlikely to interrupt a pharmacist’s routine. Even Ravi Pillay does not narrow the field quite as much as one might hope. In Geneva, however, my surname had briefly acquired a distinction I had done nothing to earn.

A memory resurfaces

That memory returned when Navi Pillay was announced as the Nobel Peace Prize laureate on 9 October 2026.

I smiled at the recollection. Then, thinking of her achievement at 85, I found myself missing my parents.

My father would have been 95 this year, my mother 82. Judge Pillay belongs to their generation. I would have loved to hear what they made of her journey and which part astonished them most.

An accomplished life can look deceptively straightforward in retrospect. The qualifications and appointments follow one another neatly on the page. It takes more effort to imagine the uncertainty before any of them were secured.

As a South African Indian born in the 1960s, I suspect many of my generation have stories of doors closed rather than opened, whether in our own lives or certainly in those of our parents and grandparents. For a young Indian woman, in the 1960s seeking an education and a legal career in apartheid Durban, poverty, racial discrimination and expectations about a woman’s place could reinforce one another.

I began wondering about the family decisions that helped Judge Pillay continue. What enabled her father, a bus driver, to support his daughter’s education when so much around them restricted women’s choices?

In a 2016 interview, Pillay credited both parents with encouraging her to remain at school while friends left for arranged marriages.

Narrowed possibilities

Reading about her schooling, I thought about the possibilities that had narrowed for my own mother before her adult life had properly begun. The circumstances were different, but the question stayed with me: who got to continue, and who decided?

Pillay’s accounts suggest that support for education could coexist with considerable fear. In an interview first published in 2022, she recalled her parents’ anxiety about political involvement and the limits apartheid had taught them to place on their aspirations. They could want their children to advance while worrying about what might happen if they challenged the world around them.

Her mother’s role deserves particular attention. Denied schooling because her own father feared she would write letters to boys, she nevertheless insisted that her children attend an English school and learn English.

I had started by asking what was unusual about her father. Her mother’s insistence now seemed at least as important.

She did not need to have attended university to recognise the value of education. Her daughter would eventually earn a master’s degree and a doctorate at Harvard Law School. I find the distance between those two women’s educational experiences extraordinary.

The aid of others

Others helped make the journey possible. Pillay recalled a school principal recognising her potential and appealing to the community of Clairwood in Durban. Residents with little money of their own contributed towards her university education.

Long before the international recognition, people had decided that this young woman deserved a chance.

That is what interests me about my parents’ generation. Its members lived with restrictions we can now readily identify, but their responses were not uniform. A parent might uphold one convention and question another. Neighbours could share conservative expectations while contributing money to send a young woman to university.

We can appreciate those decisions while acknowledging the opportunities denied to others. I know my mother would have flourished had she been able to continue her education. That conviction brings a sadness to this celebration which I cannot quite put aside.

How many other women might have flourished too?

Indentured labour

In the 1860s, Judge Pillay’s grandfather was brought from India to work on South Africa’s sugar plantations under indenture, conditions described in the Lacuna account as “semi-slavery”. His granddaughter, born in 1941, would become a Nobel laureate at 85.

There is much to celebrate in that family history. Yet the generations before her did not need a Nobel Prize in the family to make their lives worthy of recognition. Nor should a girl have to show exceptional promise before someone takes her education seriously.

Pillay’s subsequent service in international courts and as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights took her far beyond the circumstances of her childhood. Her achievement shows how much can become possible when determination meets support. It also makes me wonder how many equally determined people were held back by circumstances they could not overcome.

I wish my parents were here for that conversation. Their experiences were not hers, but her story makes me want to ask more about their choices, the pressures they faced and the futures they once imagined for themselves.

My Geneva encounter remains a question across a pharmacy counter. I have no meeting to recall, no photograph and no family connection.

What I have is the memory of hearing a familiar surname spoken with recognition far from home. Today it brings me back to my mother, and to a generation of women whose lives I wish I understood more fully.

We are not related, Judge Pillay. But there is much in your story that brings home closer. DM