How do I process something that doesn’t feel real?
As I'm writing this, the amount of information I have is distressingly small. M Ravi is dead. He was pronounced dead at Tan Tock Seng Hospital this morning. The police say they don’t suspect foul play, but investigations are ongoing.
None of us saw this coming.
Ravi is gone.
The earliest versions of local media reports of his death were awful, mainly listing his series of controversies, disciplinary proceedings, and convictions. “Suspended lawyer”, the headlines called him. “Former lawyer.” The articles have since been updated to include quotes from his peers and mention of his human rights work, but it’s appalling that that was all they had to say in the beginning. And there’s still so much that can be said about a man who really made his presence felt, and whose sudden absence now hits me like a bolt from the blue.
I’m not sure if that had been our very first meeting, but my earliest memory of Ravi is from 2010, of him preparing for a constitutional challenge against the mandatory death penalty, hard at work in a meeting room, assisted by British lawyers from the Death Penalty Project. (This was captured in ‘Yong’s Story’, a documentary for Al Jazeera English’s 101 East.) I was completely new to the death penalty issue, and had only recently learnt about Yong Vui Kong's case. Although the constitutional challenge did not succeed, it bought us time to campaign for Vui Kong. In 2012, amendments were made to the Misuse of Drugs Act, creating limited conditions under which people could be spared the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking. Vui Kong met the criteria and was resentenced to life imprisonment and caning. He’s still alive today, 16 years after the execution date the state had set for him. The government might insist that these amendments were the result of their own review process and weren’t influenced by activist or international pressure, but I believe that Ravi’s advocacy—above and beyond a lawyer's job scope—and the Save Vui Kong campaign made a difference.
If Ravi hadn’t come forward to take on the case even when it seemed as if all hope was gone, Vui Kong would not be alive today. And, because it was the campaign for Vui Kong that led me into the abolitionist movement, I probably wouldn’t have become an anti-death penalty activist either.
Ravi was part of so many of the death row cases I’ve worked on. After Vui Kong, he introduced us to Cheong Chun Yin’s father; we went to press conferences and campaign events together, even one in the JB pasar malam where Chun Yin and his father ran a stall. (Chun Yin was eventually also resentenced, and is still in Changi Prison.) I remember meeting Ravi with Masoud’s father, cooperating with him to crowdfund for Prabagaran’s mother, scrambling to raise the $20,000 in security that was needed to file an appeal for Roslan and Pausi. Where others hesitated, Ravi stepped forward, making the choice again and again to stick his neck out to file legal applications for death row prisoners. Some people criticised him, calling him reckless, inappropriate, a troublemaker. But saving a life was more urgent and important to Ravi than scoldings, fines, or disciplinary action. And, in a city that values conformity and obedience, change often requires someone who's willing to smash through what's 'proper' and 'expected' and 'sensible'.
Here’s another man Ravi saved: I was in the courtroom in October 2020 when the Court of Appeal overturned Gobi Avedian’s death sentence—a sentence that they'd given him just two years prior. Gobi had already been at the end of the line, as it were; if Ravi hadn’t taken on his case, no one would have filed the criminal motion that saved him, and he would have been hanged. Because of Ravi, Gobi is now home with his family in Malaysia.
I won’t pretend that Ravi was an easy person to get along with, or that we always had an easy friendship. He had his struggles and his failings, some of which were publicly known (as the local media reminded us first thing this morning) and for which he paid a heavy price. I don't want to whitewash or sanitise the person he was—there were times when being his friend and caring about him was difficult and painful—but I also don't want us to only remember his troubles.
He was so, so much more.
In the middle of the Covid pandemic, I filed a Protection from Harassment Act case against someone who was troubling me online. When he heard that I found the process bewildering and stressful, Ravi stepped in. He represented me during the Zoom mediation session, handling the matter with a righteous indignation and flair—what can I say, the man loved ✨drama✨—that I would have struggled to express myself. It massively lightened the load of an awkward and uncomfortable situation, and he did it without any hesitation or fuss because he was my friend.
Ravi could be brash and A Lot, sweeping through like a hurricane, talking a mile a minute, leaving introverts like me feeling slightly flattened by his sheer force of personality (and, sometimes, mania). But he could also be surprisingly perceptive.
“I know when Kirsten is stressed,” he once proclaimed to anyone within earshot, grinning at me as he teased. “When I see her post a lot of cute-cute stuff and then she has a new tattoo, then I know she is very stressed.”
His read was spot on.
I saw Ravi in Hong Lim Park on 15 October, at the vigil we held for Hamzah and his co-accused, both of them executed that morning. Hamzah was a former client; Ravi was sad and a little deflated to have lost yet another person, but still he was calm and agreed that we had to keep going. We didn’t talk much that evening; we just said hi and he gave me a hug. I could never have imagined, would never have believed—not in a hundred years, not ever—that that would be the last time I’d see him alive.
It's been hours since I first heard the news, since the media reports and the flurry of shocked, grieving texts, all of us asking one another questions that no one has the answers to. It still hasn't really sunk in; I still don't quite believe it. Maybe I won't, not until I see him for myself.
Right now, I don't know how to say goodbye to Ravi—my overwhelming, intense, gregarious, dramatic, impulsive, infuriating, inspiring, difficult, kind, mercurial, brave, brilliant friend.
How hollow the world feels today.
