We were this, the Malay rulers were this. They knew who they were. The fact of the matter is we have become who we are not meant to be. So what if they sat around with their courtiers and drank tea and smoked all day? There was jealousy and treason, there was bloodshed when it was needed, but the very nature of who we were was simplicity. We only wanted a life that we knew we always had. Change was a detriment, we did not know how to manage it. We became victims of ourselves. We have become rotten to the core.

Omar spoke with such passion, such clarity. It was dangerous rhetoric, but I knew there was a truth to it and I began to understand his infernal struggle of what it meant to be Malay.

But for now, the battle lines had been drawn. We hated Mahathir. We hated what he had spawned. We had to end the regime, we had to do what thousands of others were doing on the streets. Omar got tear-gassed for the first time, we stood and shouted in solidarity with the others. Many were getting arrested and hauled into Black Marias, thrown into smelly lock-ups. And we bailed them out.

We wrote articles, we took pictures, we attended rallies, we stood and sang the Negaraku with Anwar’s supporters, we supported Keadilan, the new Justice Party founded by Wan Azizah, Anwar’s wife. We stood on street corners with hand-made slogans and placards, we drove activists in Omar’s car to and from the courthouse, we drank endless cups of tea, talked of more reform, of plots, conspiracy theories, we were reckless, we did not care.

We were in love, we were fighting for what we believed in and that was all that mattered.

Anwar’s trial had once again attracted the world’s media to our shores. His black eye became emblematic of our dissent. It was representative of all that was wrong and all that had to be righted. The Inspector General of Police Rahim Noor had later confessed that he had personally delivered the black eye. Not his finest hour. People rioted.

Saksi kept getting more recognition and our stories kept getting angrier, edgier. Fairman had been questioned once by Special Branch—three officers showed up at the apartment one morning and took him away. Sumi, who had started seeing him—We just have sex, lots of it really—had to bail him out.

Imran had started writing a daily column called Face Off. He had lost twenty pounds from running the streets and looked leaner and browner by the day. Saksi had close to fifty thousand hits a day and Imran’s popular pieces were visceral and pointed. His commentary on the trial became iconic and the foreign journos used the site as a reliable source as to what was really happening on the ground.