All is quiet now at the Kuala Lumpur home of Anwar Ibrahim, where excited crowds gathered to plan opposition rallies in September before the former deputy prime minister was arrested by armed police and detained under Malaysia's Internal Security Act.
A broken front door bears witness to that invasion. A small sticker saying "Reformasi" on an abandoned guard post at the entrance is the only indication that Mr Anwar's wife is carrying on his fight for reform from the suburban bungalow in the Malaysian capital.
Late on Monday evening, Dr Wan Azizah Ismail invited two newspaper reporters into a room with carpeted teak floor and French windows, where a dozen lawyers and friends relaxed on divans and armchairs beneath a slowly revolving fan. A number of times as she spoke, Mr Anwar's 46-year-old wife glanced over at the lawyers for guidance. The eye specialist and mother of six has already been questioned by police about previous interviews.
Dr Wan Azizah has, however, promised her husband that she will carry on the struggle, despite the fact that she is not a skilled orator or even a politician, leading people to compare her with other Asian women thrust into political roles, like Indira Gandhi and Cory Aquino.
"What my husband started I'm just here to carry on," she asserted. "Of course they have put restrictions on me. They have said I am not allowed to have rallies and processions. But that doesn't stop the message."
She emphasised that it was a "reformation" she was leading, not a revolution. "We are not going to topple the government. We are not trying to set up something new. The basic structure is there. All we have to do is remove oppression."
Her husband, she said, had become identified with the fight "for the poor, against repression, for freedom and democracy". Despite a firebrand youth, in government "he was accepted locally and internationally as a moderate".
Asked how she could continue the movement outside UMNO, the mainstream Malay party to which her husband had belonged, Dr Wan Azizah declined to discuss tactics but said the anger of common folk transcended race among Malays, Chinese and Indians.
Now that Mr Anwar has been returned for trial on November 2nd on sex and corruption charges, the street demonstrations have ebbed.
The case of her husband had aroused something very latent in the population, especially among the young. "This is the spark," she said. "It is glowing and it is spreading."
"I don't want to put it any higher because I don't want people to say, `There you are, burning and all that'. They would misconstrue it. But at the end of the tunnel there's going to be this big light."
Before now, people looked the other way in well-off Malaysia, she conceded. But they had got the message: "If the number two of the country can be treated so despicably, what is there left for you folk?"
The treatment of her husband was a test case for Malaysia's system, she said. "If there are political differences, settle them through the ballot box and not through the abuse of police power."
If her husband and others had instigated riots "there are more than enough public order laws for this purpose; using the Internal Security Act is wrong and is an abuse of power".
Asked about the Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who sacked her husband, she made a hand signal indicating she would not answer. The only time she gave any hint of dropping her composure was when talking about the shock of seeing her husband in court, first with a black eye on September 29th, and then in a neck brace on Monday.
Mr Anwar claimed in court he was beaten up by police, and Dr Mahathir has ordered a police investigation. On Monday he "burst out in anger asking why is he treated worse than a criminal", when he could not kiss his mother goodbye. He had lost 18 lb in two weeks, which is "rather drastic", his wife said.
In detention, the former deputy prime minister had to sleep for a time on a board with no pillow and was denied all access to his lawyers and family. "My children sent him letters but he has no way of returning the letters," she said. "Any time I tried to speak to him in the court I was shushed up by the police."
Her doctor has given the slim ophthalmologist some advice about her own health. "He told me to eat more," she said.