Two mopeds carrying flag-waving youths appeared beside us about a mile from our destination. Then more motorcycles came roaring out of the darkness, drawing level with our vehicle and darting ahead, their young riders shouting and clearing the road.
In the back seat of the black-and-silver Mitsubishi Pajero, Dr Wan Azizah switched on the interior light and began waving to the lines of people gathered by the roadside as we approached Kampung Medan, a built-up district south of Kuala Lumpur. She leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder. "They will be wondering who is the white man in front," she said, laughing, making fun of a comment by Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad about "white leaders" who dared question the conviction of Wan Azizah's husband, former deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, on corruption charges.
"Reformasi" (reform), she cried through the window as the big station wagon slowed down and dozens of smiling young men crowded round to peer inside. "Reformasi," they shouted back, waving fists in the warm night air. "They're actually disappointed, they really want to see my daughter," she said with a giggle, adding that they called her "Auntie". Dr Wan Azizah's beautiful eldest daughter, 19-year-old Izzah Nurul, is a favourite with the crowds at opposition rallies, like the one which Dr Wan Azizah was going to address. Her elderly father, Dr Wan Ismail, also sitting in the back, shared the joke. "What a tragedy for them," he said, waving cheerfully. "All they get to see is an old man on this side."
Wan Azizah, the serene, soft-spoken 46-year-old woman who has been thrust into the leadership of the reform movement in Malaysia, is in private self-effacing and quick-witted, showing flashes of the humour for which she was known by fellow students during her six years studying ophthalmology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. "Do you know why the harp is the symbol of Ireland?" she asked in a teasing voice and with a slight Irish accent. "Because Irish people are always pulling strings!"
As a Malay and a pious Muslim, she always wears a coloured tudung headscarf, leading some Irish people to think she was a nun. In her 1978 college yearbook a contemporary wrote: "She is well known on the Dublin buses as the gentle Chinese nun who wouldn't cross herself going past churches." She laughed at the memory of being mistaken on the street for a religious sister.
"It was easier just to reply `Bless you, my son' rather than correct them," she said. Dr Wan Azizah returned home from Dublin with a gold medal in 1978 at the age of 25, and two years later married the man whom she always refers to simply as Anwar.
Anwar Ibrahim, then 32, was a fiery Islamic politician who, as a student leader, was interned without trial for almost two years under the notorious Internal Security Act for leading protests against poverty. Her father was not very happy at the choice. He was then head of psychological warfare at the Home Ministry, and Anwar was at the time considered antigovernment. (Like everyone else in the Anwar family, he has been radicalised by recent events and is now a supporter of reformasi).
The young radical politician surprised everyone by joining the ruling party, the United Malay National Organisation (UNMO) and throwing in his lot with its leader, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, a firebrand Malay nationalist who became prime minister and led Malaysia into a period of unprecedented growth. He chose Anwar as his deputy and political heir in 1993, at which point Wan Azizah gave up her job in Kuala Lumpur as a hospital eye surgeon and undertook a role considered more fitting for a Malay politician's spouse.
She assumed honorary posts like the chairmanship of Putera, the Islamic Girls' Movement, and the National Cancer Foundation, and spent most of her time at the spacious family bungalow in a leafy suburb of Kuala Lumpur looking after their six children, five girls and a boy, and entertaining important visitors from around the world who came to see her husband.
This relatively tranquil life among the Malaysian elite came to a sudden end in early September when the relationship between Dr Mahathir and Anwar abruptly ended. The catalyst was the Asian economic crisis and a wave of reform in nearby Indonesia which toppled President Suharto. Anwar challenged Mahathir's projectionist economic policies and threatened to expose the cronyism and corruption which had enriched a handful of Malays. This provoked mass protest demonstrations, which shook the government to its foundations. On September 20th hooded police came to the house and arrested Anwar under the Internal Security Act.
Dr Azizah remembers vividly the night he was taken away. Two of the children tried to help their father but, with the cold muzzle of a machine-gun at the neck of her 14-year-old son, they had to let him go. She was terrified that he would be ill-treated, with good reason. Anwar was brutally beaten in prison by police chief Rahim Noor, who has since been forced to resign and is now charged with "attempting to injure" Anwar. Some days later the famous picture appeared of the former deputy prime minister sporting a huge black eye. Anwar was subsequently tried on corruption and sodomy charges.
Wan Azizah sat defiantly through all 78 days of the trial, asserting her belief in his innocence, fuming at the lurid charges against him. Her composure slipped only on April 14th, when he was sentenced to six years in prison. It happened just when the two youngest children arrived in their school uniforms as the sentence was pronounced and eight-year-old Nural Imam asked innocently, "Is papa free yet?" That evening Wan Azizah told an interviewer: "That actually struck me deep - I couldn't help but feel the tears welling." In the cells Anwar told her to be brave and strong, not to cry.
Wan Azizah now cannot afford to let down her guard and display emotion. She suddenly finds herself taking her place in Asian political history along with other Asian women such as Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Sonya Gandhi in India, Megawati Sukarnoputri in Indonesia and Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, who have had to pick up the political torch for the fallen husband or father. The process started for her just before Anwar's arrest when she heard him tell a huge crowd: "If anything happens to me, then Azizah will take over."
"It was a bit of a surprise, as he hadn't discussed it with me," she said, laughing. The uncomplicated former eye surgeon acknowledges she was a political novice who had never before questioned the flaws in the system or given a speech at a political rally. The lack of personal baggage, however, allowed her to become a symbol of the new political culture, acceptable to all opposition groups. At first she addressed crowds only on the question of justice for Anwar, whom she steadfastly maintains is the innocent victim of a political conspiracy.
Then, on April 10th, she became president of the National Justice Party (Keadilan), a bridge for the reform movement uniting Malays with the Chinese and Indian minorities, and a political safety valve for the energy of the young, such as its vice president Tian Chua, a popular young social activist, who was arrested and beaten by police in demonstrations after Anwar's conviction.
"It's a very heavy responsibility I feel," she said in the wood-panelled reception room of her home, where two fans whirred overhead and the sounds of family life drifted in from the living quarters.
She has asked Corazino Aquino for counsel on the art of public speaking and she advised her: "Always talk about what you know about." She said, "I tell it like it is, from the heart." Many people compare the two women. If Aquino could become leader in place of her husband, why not Wan Azizah? But Malaysia has a Westminster-type electoral system, unlike the Philippine's presidential elections, and the leader of the majority party in Malaysia is the person who becomes prime minister.
Dr Mahathir's UNMO party, with 168 of the 192 parliament seats, remains far and away the best financed political power in the country. Among the opposition groups, only the ultra-Islamic party, Pas, can match UNMO for organisation. To have any hope of gaining power in elections due in the next year, Azizah's party must field credible candidates across the nation and make common cause with Pas and other opponents of the government such as the Chinese-dominated Democratic Action party.
I asked her if co-operating with Pas, which advocates some extreme measures such as stoning adulterers, might compromise her with more moderate Malaysians. "I think it's like a symbiosis, the sort of relationship such that we both understand each other," she said. "When Anwar was thrown out into the wilderness, Pas spoke the same language against injustice. So that was the ground for co-operation."
There was nothing in Islam against a woman ruler, she added. "In the Koran there is a queen who ruled a country, so gender is not the question here." But she has not yet decided whether she will stand for election. She sees herself "almost like Mother Teresa - I feel that I could have some of her values and draw out the goodness of people."
Her vision for the country is far from revolutionary and her political platform has yet to evolve much beyond fighting corruption and cronyism. "You cannot just say you are going to be free," she said. "It's relative. Malaysia must be free, democratic, accountable, benevolent, with good government, and growth, but with accountability, and it has to filter through the masses. You must promote growth and profit and big business."
She was not so much studying political theory as living it, she said. This is evident in the way she conducts herself among the enthusiastic masses who turn out to see her, such as the 10,000 people at the open-air Kampung Medan rally. She has a natural political talent for judging the mood of her audience, and her defiance keeps the reformasi pot boiling.
On a lighter note she confided that Anwar had suggested a sunflower as the symbol for the new party, but she thought it smacked too much of sunflower cooking oil and the kitchen. She approved instead two Islamic crescents facing each other to form the outline of an eye - the famous black eye, an eye for justice, and an eye on Mahathir. The eye has, in fact, created a huge industry in political memorabilia. In Kampung Medan, among the spiky durian fruit and fast food stalls, dozens of vendors displayed T-shirts, badges, flags, books, stickers, CDs, tapes, even plastic wall clocks featuring Anwar's black eye.
The authorities in turn keep a wary eye on Wan Azizah. Police discreetly watch the house and her phone is tapped, she said. Former close acquaintances shun the family and the pro-government media portray her as a troublemaker. To do a live question-and-answer interview on CNN she had to fly to Hong Kong as stations in Malaysia blocked it. Students at Petronas University were told not to show solidarity with her daughter, Izzah, a chemical engineering student who is a rallying point for youth. Her semi-retired father was required to resign as chairman of an education company.
Besides these difficulties and having to head up a political party, Azizah has to raise a family without her husband. Anwar is serving his sentence in a concrete-floored cell in Sungai Buloh prison, for which, ironically, he allocated funds when a minister. "He is in solitary confinement," she said.
"That actually upsets me the most. If you still have human life around you it kind of takes away part of the isolation. But he is in isolation from six in the evening till next morning with no human life, nothing, just the eeriness of the cell. He has no TV, no radio. He sometimes gets reading material and sometimes he does not. I can visit him once a month. If I am alone, I will be separated with the glass."
Describing life since the verdict, she said simply: "I find it sad, and sometimes, like, unbearable." But, as she told reporters on a recent trip to the Philippines when asked about her impact on Malaysian political life, "Here I come, ready or not."