We had come face to face with a reckoning, as if we had to pay for all our sins in one go and yet find redemption at the same time. KL had unearthed a side that no one had ever seen before; it was new, exhilarating, but entirely unpredictable. Thousands had woken up, but no, this wasn’t like Indonesia where Suharto had resigned. Resigned. He was shamed, by his own people, students who took to the streets, by the tens upon tens of thousands. Indonesia had witnessed genocides, millions had died in seas of blood, but we didn’t share the same script. We had a bloodless transition from colonial rule to independence, we had only one major incident of racial riots in 1969. But what we did have was an endless simmering. Of something, and everything.

But, this. This. With Anwar, we had something to fight for, something to write about. We needed to document it, we had to write it, record it.

Fight it.

We had to fight it, we had to fight back.

And we did.

The Review was a monthly magazine, funded and edited by Lan, short for Roslan. His mother was Malay, his father English and Iban, the largest indigenous group in the state of Sarawak.

Call me Fairman, he’d say if you just met him, shaking your hand vigorously.

Roslan Fairman was born in Kuching, Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo, raised in KL, sent off to Harrow at ten and then went on to read law at Oxford. He had inherited his father’s law firm but had decided that a career in journalism suited his dress sense and temperament better.

No, he’d insist, I always wrote; did law just because the parents wanted it.

He was tall, wore a battered bespoke waistcoat and kept imported copies of The Guardian on his desk in a neat pile. He had a shock of hair that kept falling over his face, which he’d swing to the right, much like a singer in a 90s boy-band, except for the expensive tortoise-shell glasses and the worn, handmade Church’s shoes. We all decided to call him Fairman; it seemed the most apt as he was the editor of a magazine, after all.