PKR’s Johari Abdul awoke the morning after his victory over Umno’s Zainuddin Maidin for the Sungai Petani parliamentary seat, to the ambivalence of memory.

Bobbing through the cathartic flush of his electoral triumph over a cabinet minister were shards of memory of times when he had intimate knowledge of what Thoreau meant by “most men lead lives of quiet desperation”.

johari abdul interview 170308 In 1998, Johari was on the cusp of becoming a millionaire after borrowing RM5 million from a bank to take up a 49 percent stake in a company in Penang on the verge of a listing on the stock market. The vertiginous heights of the corporate world beckoned this former civil servant.

Then, abruptly and rudely, came the fall from corporate grace. Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Anwar Ibrahim was politically and socially decapitated in September that year, plunging Johari, an intimate of Anwar, into a slough of despond.

“I lost everything,” said Johari, 53, told Malaysiakini after his election victory. Even in euphoria, memories of times when he had to peddle merchandise at pasar malam (night markets) to feed his family of six children could not be submerged.

“I have known desperation and doldrums. I’m not saying I alone suffered those experiences. Others among Anwar’s supporters, too, had to endure them but I doubt many had a swing as extreme as mine.”

anwar zeals It would have been easy for Johari to adopt a neutral stance towards the fallen Anwar that would have ensured a different outcome to his fledgling career in business.

“I couldn’t because I instinctively knew the charges against him were untrue,” explained Johari, who was first attracted to Anwar’s leadership in 1976. As a student in Universiti Malaya, he saw the former speak in his capacity as president of the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia.

“I was impressed by him and had further opportunity to observe him at close quarters more than a decade later when I was in the political division of the Prime Minister’s Department and Anwar was full minister,” continued Johari, a fast-talking man of brimming energy and analytical acuity.

“Anwar was the same person - pious, serious at work but able to relax outside of duty, with no inconsistency between his public image and private conduct, between public pronouncement and private opinion. He was surface straight through.

“I know because I had to make arrangements for meetings and other functions for ministers and foreign leaders where several times I saw Anwar up close when it’s not easy to dissemble.”

Difficult odyssey

When Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad unleashed a raft of charges alleging moral depravity and corruption against Anwar in early September 1998, Johari went with his solidly based perception of Anwar.

“I decided to pitch my tent in his camp and damn the consequences, dire as they turned out to be,” he recalled.

Backed by his homemaker wife Noraini, Johari - scion of a profligate but proud father and a determined, uncomplaining mother - tried his hand at many roles, from insurance agent to peddler.

It was a travail-ridden odyssey, punctuated by two attempts at electoral representation, for parliament in Sungai Petani in the 1999 polls, and for the Batu Arang state seat in the 2004 ballot. Both ended in failure.

Meanwhile, he and Noraini added two more kids to bring their brood to eight, all of whom the couple has taught to find an self-reliant foothold in an uncertain world, with faith imbibed from their paternal grandmother that the value of a life depends on its dignity, and not on its success, and that truth must triumph at last.

For Johari, the 2008 elections are significant, not on account of an auspicious debut in Parliament, but a test of whether he can look at triumph just as he has looked at disaster “as two imposters just the same”, as the poet Kipling advised.

“I have been near the mountaintop and I’ve been down in the dumps. I have taken the rough and I have felt the smooth. I feel like how Anwar must have felt when he was near the top and then plunged to the bottom: a determination to leave a legacy that’s signed with our honour.”