The second half was a play. A pigtailed girl skipped onto the stage, which was now a jungle, winsomely addressing her woodland friends. Nam Teck didn’t have a lot of time for stories, finding them childish. Kuala Lumpur was about facts, hard-edged things he was slowly collecting; when he had enough, he imagined, he’d be wise.

The play wound through a number of scenes, placing the heroine in ever greater peril. No sooner did she evade the clutches of a Japanese soldier, when a smooth-talking ang moh tried to drug and seduce her. In the last scene, an upstanding Chinese comrade rescued her, returning her to the bosom of her family—but first, he lectured her for consorting with the enemy. She wept as she acknowledged her mistake. “I forgot myself. I must strengthen my revolutionary zeal!” she cried, transformed, her eyes like stars. “England and Japan do not care for me. I must not forget that I am Chinese, I must not forget what we are fighting for.”

The entire cast came on stage, the choir behind them, singing a revolutionary song. The audience was on its feet, their gaze faraway and dewy. Nam Teck was paralysed. He knew what he’d just seen—these were leftists, with their dangerous talk. The government was hunting down people like them.

He looked around for his friends. Seng had disappeared, and Ah Lam was near the front of the crowd, singing with his arm across his chest. He looked like a hero himself, as if there should be a roaring sea behind him and the wind in his hair.

Part of Nam Teck wanted to leave. It wasn’t safe. If the police came—and the way they were singing, surely they were audible from the street—everyone in this basement would be taken away and locked up. He wouldn’t be able to explain himself. But then, part of him thought, You wanted adventure, that’s why you came to the city. And it was thrilling, the ideas he’d heard, the thought of a new world full of youthful energy, the past swept away. Without even realising, he’d starting singing too, his face as bright as if he believed.

•

Afterwards, it felt a bit like a party, except everyone was arguing about revolution in a terribly earnest way. Someone wondered if the play was ideologically sound to simply deplore the colonial forces, when surely it would be better to correct their thinking. Someone else was discussing fund-raising, and whether it was too soon after the end of the Emergency to come out into the open again.

Nam Teck found he could join a group and just stand there nodding, and no one minded. He was new, so they wouldn’t expect him to contribute. At the moment, all they were doing was giving him awareness. The ideas would inflame him, they believed, as they themselves were once set alight by this new way of looking at the world.