The Klang Valley is dotted by verdant areas where only the rich live. The first gentrified neighbourhood in KL was Kenny Hills, or now known as Bukit Tunku. This was where our first Prime Minister lived, in a beautiful colonial house with hardwood floors, high ceilings and majestic balustrades. Some of those houses still remain, but many had been torn down to make way for kitsch condominiums with million-dollar price tags. The ones that do remain are houses like the one Fairman’s parents own, and a few more that are scattered all over the hill. At night, the entire area is transformed and the trees take on a life of its own. Snakes and wild boar creep out, along with prowling civet cats and monitor lizards. Monkeys whoop and whistle from treetops, frogs and cicadas provide a veritable orchestra. You can’t take the rainforest out of the city—no matter how hard you try.

Mother had a friend who lived in a colonial bungalow on Jalan Syers. She was the wife of an ambassador from an undetermined European country. I was eight. Perhaps it was Belgium or Holland? Or was it Germany? Aunty Katherine, mother’s schoolmate from Ipoh was a flamboyant character, who walked around the house as if she were a memsahib from the pages of Somerset Maugham. She wore loose-fitting flowery dresses, wide hats and talked with a poncy English accent, as she had been sent to boarding school when she was very young. Once we went there for tea and I was transported onto the set of an English summer, with tables on the lawn, white lace doilies, silverware, pink roses in vases, tea in delicate china cups with flowers, fresh scones made by the Indian housekeeper, clotted cream, homemade strawberry and rhubarb jam, and the thinnest cucumber sandwiches imaginable. Aunty Katherine never had any children but she owned at least twenty cats. Keeps the snakes away! she used to say.

Then, Mother and Aunty Katherine started drinking gin and tonics with slivers of lemon until it got late in the evening and when her husband, the Ambassador, came home after work, we all sat down and had dinner. He was a little bald man who spoke in a thick accent, he could have been German, but I wasn’t sure. We ate from plates with gold trimmings and I drank orange juice from a crystal wine glass, while the adults drank white wine, then red, then cognac. Dinner was delicious—there was a meat pie with mashed potatoes, French beans with melted garlic butter and a trifle for dessert. It was the most sumptuous meal I had ever had in all my eight years, and as the conversation drifted later and later into the night, I was carried by the Ambassador to a couch in the study, where I was covered by a fluffy blanket and left to sleep.