Ceylon Hill was the last green haven in the centre of Kuala Lumpur, dotted with a cluster of graceful colonial-style apartments. Their curved balconies of cantilevered concrete hung over thick, lush jungles, with verdant wild banana plants and local foxes or musang. These were enviable spaces. Inside, large, airy sitting rooms with clear glass window panes beckoned in cool evening breezes, delightful on cloyingly hot days. On the top of the hill, a water tower overlooked a handful of cream-coloured bungalows built in the 50s, still lived in by some of KL’s oldest families. The apartments below, in contrast, had become popular with burgeoning artists and musicians who had begun populating them, finding the cheap rent affordable in the final vestiges of colonial glory.

On weekends, there were parties with live music, performance poetry, cheap wine and marijuana. There was talk of reform, angry, wild, avant garde gestures. Fiery speeches from activists, musicians, filmmakers. There was hunger that had to be fed, a need for expression, a need for dissent. A movement had sprung up in the arts community. Their logo—a black question mark against a yellow background with the slogan, Artis Pro Activ—APA. Apa—What? What was going on? A question for those in power. A question that demanded answers.

Across the road, the KL Tower glimmered at night, music thumping from its base, where wild raves fed music and Ecstasy to techno-addled youth. There was always a time to party.

In the four years since Reformasi, KL had thrived. There were more expats than ever, many who had come for the drugs, stayed for the girls. DJs fell in love with locals and procreated, and so the culture of mixed bloods carried on.

Down the road from Ceylon Hill, a row of refurbished shop houses had become the centre of KL’s nightlife. Bangsar was old news. There were tapas bars, Irish pubs, German gastro-bars and one gay bar. Frangipani, the white colonial bungalow which had been transformed into a French-fusion restaurant with an upstairs members-only club, continued its Friday gay nights despite numerous raids, and hundreds came out to “cuci mata” or feast their eyes on young, nubile boys. Women and men packed the floors, champagne and cocktails shimmied off bar tops, mixologists twirled bottles with ease. There was chatter, kissing, extravagance. The women were beautiful, the men even more so.

There was always talk of money. KL was becoming more cosmopolitan. Foreign investment was higher than it had been and the KL skyline was proof. New buildings competed for thinner and leaner shards of sky. Investor confidence was strong, despite the shocking announcement from Mahathir that he was going to resign.

On 25 January 2002, as if straight out of a Malay daytime soap opera, he had stood in front of thousands at his party’s general assembly—the United Malays National Organisation, or UMNO—and said with tearful hubris, “It’s time for me to go, yes, it’s time for me to go.”