Former Utusan Malaysia editor and political detainee Said Zahari, who died yesterday at the age of 86, enjoyed a bout of fond reminiscences with a couple of left wing visitors who paid him a visit two days prior to his death.

“He was in jovial mood and full of fond memories,” offered Dr Syed Husin Ali, who had known Said since Husin’s undergraduate days at Universitiy of Malaya in Bukit Timah in the late 1950s.

“We (the other visitor was KS Jomo) had heard he was not well and so decided to call on him at his son's house in Subang Jaya,” said Syed Husin, who was among dozens of friends, relatives and political acquaintances of Said at the burial which was held at the Muslim cemetery in the township at dusk yesterday.

Said Zahari had expired at his daughter’s house in Puncak Alam in Shah Alam at 12.30pm yesterday, his joviality of days earlier a brief interlude before closure.

Said Zahari had been bedridden for at least three months prior to his death.

“Last Sunday, when Jomo and I visited we found him full of recall of the little details of past encounters,” said Syed Husin, the just retired two-term PKR senator and former deputy president of the party.

Economist Jomo Kwame Sundram had only recently returned from international postings with the United Nations and other world bodies.

Much of Said’s reminiscences revolved around the courtesies extended by Jomo to him.

Food memories would have been huge sustenance during Said’s 17-year detention under internal security ordinances between 1963 and 1980 in Singapore for activities the People’s Action Party government of Lee Kuan Yew considered detrimental to national security.

Said is famed in Malaysia/Singapore history as the editor who waged a forlorn battle to keep Utusan Malaysia from being owned by Umno.

A strike at the paper, which was launched in Singapore just before the World War II as a vehicle for Malay nationalism, was led by Said in 1961 to prevent Umno’s takeover of the paper.

It proved to be abortive and saw Said sent back from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, where he was born in 1930 and had begun his career as a journalist.

An attempt to return to (then) Malaya after the Utusan strike had collapsed was halted at immigration at the Causeway, which left Said effectively confined to Singapore where he proceeded to set up Parti Rakyat Singapore, a move that saw him detained under Operation Cold Store in 1963.

This dragnet saw scores of left wing activists arrested under internal security laws that crippled the movement in Singapore.

At 17 years, Said’s detention was the second longest in the history of Singapore, Chia Thye Poh’s of the Barisan Sosialis exceeding the span by a full decade.

With Said’s death, another member of the left wing cohort that lost the battle with the PAP in Singapore and with Umno in Malaysia in the struggle to replace the British colonials has departed.

Only those with a taste in counterfactual history will trouble to speculate as to how things would have been had they won.