I WAS sharing thoughts this week with a former editor of the opinion section of this newspaper about another past editor whom I had the good fortune and privilege to know and whom I still have rather fond memories of: Rehman Rashid.
This editor (who prefers to be unnamed for this piece) and I share great admiration for Rehman, primarily because as writers ourselves, we were in awe of the verve and sheer power of the way the man wielded his pen.
Although, like with almost all editors I have worked with, my interactions with Rehman had been mostly remote (by email and short mobile messages), he was more chatty than other editors I know.
Our exchanges were often inane and had almost nothing to do with whatever I was churning out, except in one case.
He came out very strongly against the gist of something I wrote about the "Allah" controversy (on whether it should be exclusively used by Muslim Malaysians) when it first flared up.
But he was merely sharing his opinions and had no thought against my right to express a differing view from his in my article which he was editing.
That was when he shared that he was perhaps quintessentially Malaysian: that although he was Muslim, half his family (his mother's side) is Roman Catholic.
Which made me want to delve more into the personal side of Rehman beyond what we publicly know through his jottings in his columns, his leader articles and his books (A Malaysian Journey and Peninsula being among the most celebrated).
The editor whom I was chatting with this week said she came to know Rehman personally after he rejoined NST, in early 2000: "He confided in me, he was a difficult man, often misread by others, but once you get past that veneer, he's a different person. Someone kind, human, and a brilliant thinker."
The trained marine biologist became a celebrated journalist after joining the NST in 1981.
He left for Hong Kong after getting caught in the Operation Lalang dragnet. It was in Hong Kong that Rehman briefly married the love of his life, the lawyer Rosemarie Chen.
He was to write of his married life: "For the next three years we were blissful as a couple; living well and comfortably, and operating at globe-girding levels. But I was not happy professionally, and Rosemarie understood why. 'Your heart is in Malaysia,' she said."
More specifically, Rehman's heart belonged back in NST. Chequered though his life was in and out of NST and of the country, as he wrote while in Hong Kong of the Malaysian diaspora: "Even those who would never go back to Malaysia and would never want to, or those who went back and found they could not abide what Malaysia had become in their absence, would have in their hearts a place of that name, attached to their memories of childhood and youth. If home was where the heart was, Malaysian hearts were everywhere."
Around 2010, Rehman formally retired. He wrote in Peninsula (published in 2016): "For five years I floated on my retirement savings, picking up some extra cash now and then with a commissioned essay or editing job, reading and doodling, riding my bicycles for fun and getting fit in the process, without any thought of what I would do with myself and life.
"It was an achievement enough to have survived this long without needing any more of much, and being able to reach the end unaided, not burdening anyone."
But one fine day in early 2017, he was out on his bicycle when he collapsed of a massive heart attack. Hovering between life and death in hospital for four months, he breathed his last on June 4 that year. Rehman was just 62.
The writer views developments in the nation, region and wider world from his vantage point in Kuching
