These days most of my adventures start with an email, but in the mid-nineties they still arrived by telephone, and they could come from any time zone, night or day.
‘Mr Crofts,’ the distant voice asked as I picked up the phone, jerked painfully awake by its alarming ring, ‘do you like coming to the Far East?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, expecting to be told next that I should buy a time-share overlooking Pattaya beach.
‘I’m working for a very successful businessman,’ he continued, ‘in Kuala Lumpur. He is thinking of writing his autobiography.’
Once I had shaken my thoughts into place one thing led to another and a month or two later I found myself ensconced in a five star hotel in Kuala Lumpur, waiting to meet the founder and chief executive of one of Malaysia’s most successful banks. A private dining room had been booked and he swept into the lobby exactly on time, at the head of an entourage galloping to keep up. Over lunch he talked while we chewed on chickens’ feet, watched by the silently munching entourage around the circular table.
It was a good story. His father had come from China with nothing more than a rush mat rolled up under his arm, working on the rubber plantations as a coolie. The banker had started his working life as a child tapping rubber from high up on the trunks of the trees with flaming torches strapped to his head during the hours of darkness, frequently singeing his hair off.
Now he lived amongst all the trappings you would expect of one of the richest and most successful people in a city which was at the forefront of what was then being called the ‘Tiger Economy’. We got on well and he hired me for the job. It meant spending many hours with him in the city, but also travelling to the jungle village where he’d been born and brought up. He answered every question openly but I couldn’t help feeling that there was something else to the story that I wasn’t being told.
He was widely feted around town and found the attention mildly embarrassing. There was one particular dinner at a fancy hotel where the hosts insisted on ordering an expensive bottle of wine just for him, despite his protests, while the rest of the party drank something more modest.
‘I don’t like that,’ he muttered as we left at the end of the meal, ‘but what can you do? People want to do things for you.’
During the course of us writing the book the ‘Tiger Economy’ crashed. There were reports in the papers that the banker was now worth many billions of dollars less than he had been when I first met him, but I didn’t see any discernible change in his lifestyle.
After several trips to KL, I was getting close to finishing the book when he announced he was coming to London and invited me to his hotel in Grosvenor Square for lunch. I was shocked to be greeted by a man with only a few wisps of hair on his head where just a few weeks before he had sported a lustrous black mop.
‘At home I have to wear a wig,’ he explained when he saw my eyes flickering to the top of his head. ‘If word got out that I was ill it would affect the business.’
‘You’re ill?’
With that announcement a number of things became clear, particularly the urgency with which he now wanted to see the project finished. The hair loss was due to chemotherapy and that lunch was the last time I saw him alive. The book was published in Singapore and was a fitting memorial to the man and his achievements. Without him there to promote it, however, it was never likely to reach an audience much wider than his friends, family and business associates.