I remember how excited Abah would be when Umno won the elections back in the 1970s and 1980s. To him, Umno must have been the best thing to have happened to the Malays.

He passed on that belief to me and, although it had not been entirely blind faith, I see, yet again, that ignorance is truly bliss.

Abah is gone now, but I wonder what he would have said when Anwar Ibrahim got the sack. Would he have been as compelled to defend the practices of the Barisan Nasional government as he always had in the past?

I guess I'll never know. What I do know, however, is that the Anwar's sacking and the incidents that followed had been like a wake-up call.

To me, Dr Mahathir Mohamad represented all that Malaysia had achieved. And Anwar represented all that Malaysia could achieve in the future.

Although quite different in their approaches, Mahathir and Anwar represented a believable continuity. They both provided a sense of posterity that made me feel secure about the future.

Then, in one fell swoop, all that was shattered and I grew up to the realities of the present. I realised that the man whom I looked up to for the better part of my life had a different side to him.

And ironically, I have Mahathir to thank for. He has had a hand in shaping the person that I am today.

If it were not for him, I would have been too dull-witted to see through him.

I believed in the virtue of presenting balanced news because he said it was important. "Look at how the international media distort news," he would say.

He said in his Vision 2020 declamation that a liberal society was crucial in order to achieve what his vision had promised. And so I delved even further in area of liberal thought.

He said that Islam was important because it ensured that justice would be done. And so I pursued further studies in the field of Shariah .

The result was that I became armed with the means of seeing through all the lies.

A part of me wishes that I had not. And that is the part that remembers how it is to love him.

It is akin to a child's love for a father. The child begins by thinking the world of his or her father in spite of all the bad things that the father does or is capable of doing.

As the child grows, disillusionment sets in, but a part of that child still loves his or her father, all because the child remembers the bliss of innocence. And when the father passes away, in spite of how horrible the father had been, the child will shed tears and make prayers for father.

However, the child would also be relieved; relieved of the fact that he or she would no longer have to cater to the whims of the terrible father.

Thus although I have every reason to hate Mahathir just as a child would a terrible father, a part of me will mourn his eventual passing. It is because I truly loved him once and that love will cause me to mourn for all that he could have been.

People who swear their undying loyalty to him say that history would judge him kindly. Well, I only wish that if he is to have anything further to do with history, it would be such as to restore my faith in him.

Barring divine intervention, that could, perhaps, be asking too much. And so, like the child who would shed tears at the passing of his or her terrible father, I too would shed my tears. I would also be relieved when his reign finally ends.