example, he once traveled to Pahang to give a speech for a cabinet minister who hoped to turn the province into a tourist destination. To prove that the area was free of crocodiles, the minister dove into the river, which prompted Anwar to quip that he was safe since crocodiles don’t attack other crocodiles—a joke with a barb: the Malay word for crocodile also means “lecher.” At lunch he was seated next to the minister’s wife, who complained about her husband’s wandering eye. Do you know how I survive? he said to her. My wife’s an ophthalmologist, and every morning she puts a drop in each of my eyes so that only she is beautiful to me. The minister’s wife said, Give me two drops!
When I asked Anwar what had become of the minister and his scheme to attract tourists to Pahang, he replied that in league with Mahathir the minister had managed to squander all the timber in his province, and now he was its governor.
“He sounds like all politicians,” I said.
“Almost all,” Anwar corrected me.
He was determined to rise above partisan politics. Unable to air his views in the local media (“We have freedom of speech,” he explained with a grin. “We just don’t have freedom after speech!”), he had started a blog to answer questions on any subject from his countrymen. Nor was he afraid to take them to task for criticizing atrocities committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib while ignoring or even condoning problems in their backyard—censorship, innocent people detained without trial, rampant corruption. This was a forum for him to work out his ideas about Islam and freedom, which he had first tested in his political career, then reflected upon in prison, and now hoped to put into practice. In dark circumstances he had discovered that clarity of vision is an effective counter to terror, and in his new life he was trying to rally his countrymen to see that it was in their interest to heed the call of their better selves.
His theme was courage—which put me in mind of Georgia O’Keeffe’s confession that she was always afraid, and that her fear had never stopped her. At the opening of her museum in Santa Fe this had rattled around my mind. I was to appear on a panel to discuss her work, and in the vestibule outside the auditorium a man struck up a conversation with me. His father had worked for O’Keeffe as her gardener, and he was eager to describe a ritual of hers: how every fall she would gather hundreds of paintings that did not measure up to her exacting standards and burn them in a bonfire. It was a ceremony of liberation, predicated on the realization that these works lacked the clarity of line and color that she demanded. He remembered how delighted she was to watch them go up in smoke—and it occurred to me that this was how she freed herself to see anew, to figure reality afresh, to strike out into unclaimed aesthetic terrain. At every stage of her painting life she had transformed herself, discovering new ways to render the world in images of flowers, and bones from the desert, and ladders propped against the adobe wall of her house, and clouds glimpsed from above: step after step, always afraid, always alert to the next insight (in + sight). She aged gracefully in her paintings, fearless in her explorations.
It was time to leave—Anwar had to pack for his trip—and I suspected that when I went over my notes about our meeting it would seem natural to invoke Shakespeare, not Hamlet or The Tempest but Julius Caesar, the consummate drama of honor: “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” Caesar tells his wife in the second act. “The valiant never taste of death but once.” Anwar was still very much alive.
Palms lined the road to my hotel on the outskirts of KL. Laborers rested on the construction site of a new high-rise. The odor of rotting leaves and sewage wafted up from the metal grates on the sidewalk, along which I would walk in blazing heat to an Internet café, where for two ringgits (about fifty cents) I could check my e-mail. The café was filled at all hours of the day and night with young men playing video games, the most popular of which featured an American soldier walking down a street in Baghdad, shooting insurgents.
One day I joined an official from an opposition party for lunch at a Kelantan-style restaurant near a public housing project in KL. The official, who was preparing to run for parliament, brought along several volunteers—a toothless man who introduced himself as the president of the housing project’s residential commission; a student from the University of Malaya; an insurance claims processor; a Chicago Bulls fan who worked as a clerk for a German company; a one-armed man who never spoke—all of whom welcomed the chance to tell me about the corruption of the ruling party, which was preventing them from organizing the residents of the project. What to do? said the official. We sat cross-legged at a low table, with a video of traditional musicians performing on the screen above, and feasted with our fingers on beef, chicken, fish, petai (a paste made from pungent seeds wrapped in curry leaves), sticky rice, various vegetable dishes, fried bananas. Over coffee the official criticized the government for its inability to tamp down the ethnic tensions, which had newly risen over the fate of a national hero, the first Malaysian to climb Mount Everest—a Hindu, as it happened. Crippled later in life, the mountaineer was confined to a hospital bed until a Muslim shaman healed him—a miracle, the story went, that inspired him to convert to Islam. But there was evidence that he was delusional at the time of his conversion, and in any event his healing was short-lived, for he suffered a fatal stroke. When the religious police claimed his body, his widow filed an injunction in civil court asserting that he had been a practicing Hindu until his death. The matter was referred to a sharia court, which forbade her attendance, and so her husband was buried in a Muslim graveyard—which enraged the Indian and Chinese communities.
“What to do?” the official repeated.
What the volunteers next wanted to discuss, though, was a DVD being circulated of a documentary purporting to show that 9/11 was a plot devised by the CIA and Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service). How else to explain the fact that television cameras had been positioned to record the destruction if bombs had not been planted in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? The clerk who idolized Michael Jordan led the anti-American charge, and nothing I said could convince him that al-Qaeda had hijacked the planes flown into the buildings, not even when I reminded him that Osama bin Laden had taken credit for the attack. We parted on a sour note.
When we were out of earshot the official took my arm. “Do you see how their thinking has been corrupted?” he said. “And they’re more enlightened than most people in this country.” He did not expect to win his election.
Later that night, I hailed a taxi to take me to my hotel. The Tamil driver stopped at the light to pick up a young woman in a brown T-shirt and jeans, and at once began to lecture her, as if resuming a conversation, which seemed to verge on argument. From time to time she nodded, which led the driver, a wiry man with long hair and a thin mustache, to talk even faster, waving his hands, his two-inch-long fingernails gleaming in the headlights of the passing cars. The air conditioner was broken, gasoline fumes filled the taxi. Suddenly the driver turned to ask me where I was from and if I was a Christian. He gave my answers some thought, and then, pointing at the woman, said in a thick accent, We are anti-Muslim. I asked if he was Christian or Hindu. TOG, he replied, an acronym he had to repeat several times until I figured out that he was saying Tool of God—though something may have been lost in translation.
He fell silent, and then, inexplicably, turned onto an unlit road, which wound through a park or a rubber plantation. There were no cars or houses in sight, and when I asked him where we were going he pulled over to the side of the road and got out. The woman waited until she saw him light a cigarette before she reached for my hand. Do you want a massage? she said. Not tonight, I said. No problem, she replied, and called to the driver. He grimaced, stubbing out his cigarette, and drove me to my hotel without another word. The fare was sixty ringgits. He said he had no change for a hundred.
Khalil Ibrahim’s self-portrait, in a retrospective exhibition at a gallery in the Petronas Twin Towers, was an essay in double vision: the artist stood before a table, an unfinished floral painting at his back, the left side of his face in such thick shadow that only the arm of his eyeglasses could be seen. But it was impossible to tell where the light came from, since the blank part of the canvas behind him, which was as bright and harsh as sunlight, had a shadow of its own—as if another figure were lurking somewhere in the studo—or what the source of the different shadows might be. The artist’s lips