The almost empty bottle of gin sat between us and there was already a line of empty bottles in her kitchen from our drinking sessions over the past few weeks. We’d lost our jobs so we had been reduced to drinking at home.

One more gin pahit coming up! Gin, served up with a sliver of lime, colonial style.

Goddammit, Sumi, you need a planter’s chair. I am a sweaty Englishman, waiting for his houseboy to bring his noontime gin.

A planter’s chair? Where the hell am I supposed to find one? Do they even still make them?

Antique shops. My dad found one in Malacca. Kutty’s.

Drive down there one of these days?

Sure. Why not?

We clinked glasses and sighed simultaneously.

I feel so helpless.

Tell me about it.

I was chain-smoking Sempoernas: skinny, sweet Indonesian clove cigarettes. Sumi didn’t smoke as much as I did, but that day she did. She took one from me, lit it up and inhaled deeply.

This is going straight to my head.

We’d been talking about options. There was a protest that day and we were exhausted from running the streets. The number of protests was growing and KL had seen nothing like it. Malaysians were angry, and people were coming out in droves to show their support. Fear had left us. Years of indoctrination were rendered futile. People had woken up to an anger that had to be released. And for many, the only option was to just show up on the street, to be seen and to be heard.

I felt a measure of pride, and to be running next to strangers felt more meaningful than anything I had known until then. It was full-throttle adrenaline; it was heady and rich, it made us bolder and more reckless, as if history had conspired and collided into one moment, where all could be free.

There were coiffured ladies linking hands with women from the kampungs, men, women and children from the suburbs of KL. There was no issue of being Indian, Chinese, Malay or Other, we were one, we were all the same opposed against injustice. We had never been so bold.

It was inspiring; I felt proud. Proud that people were coming out of their houses to stand on the street with us. It was historic, we would rewrite the history books or at least try to.

The day before we’d read that a 15-year-old girl had been arrested as she’d pelted a policeman with an empty gas canister. She was hauled away kicking and screaming, and one newspaper showed a close-up of her face twisted in rage. The headline screamed, “Renegade Teen”.

The papers are so shit right now, it’s so bloody biased.

Well, what do you expect, they’re all scared and they have to toe the line, otherwise they’d lose their licenses. Look what happened to us.

Nobody reads the papers anyway, it’s all lies.

So what do we read then—apart from the threads and Sang Kancil?