The day Mahathir spelt out his love for Hasmah

There is a Scrabble board on the table at Merdeka Grill, the letters arranged across it to spell three words that have survived 71 years: I LOVE YOU.

Dr Mahathir Mohamad is leaning over the table, looking at the tiles. Around him are dinner, pastries, city lights and family.

It is a recreation, but not just any family game.

The scene has been staged by his grandchildren to recreate something their grandfather did for their grandmother, Dr Hasmah Mohamad Ali, in 1955.

The original was much simpler.

According to their son Mokhzani Mahathir, April 23 is the date his parents regard as the beginning of their love.

It means so much to them that they have continued to celebrate it over the years, sometimes giving it more significance than their wedding anniversary.

There was just one problem in 1955.

Mahathir was too shy to say the words. So he spelt them.

That detail, shared by Mokhzani after Hasmah’s death at 100, adds a wonderfully intimate scene to a love story Malaysians have heard in many versions over the years.

The young medical student who would one day speak before parliaments and presidents apparently could not bring himself to tell the woman he loved what he was feeling.

Scrabble gave him another way.

He arranged the letters and let the board do the talking.

It sounds almost impossibly old-fashioned now, which is perhaps what makes it so charming.

Seven decades later, Mokhzani’s children decided to recreate the moment for their grandparents at Merdeka Grill at Park Hyatt Kuala Lumpur inside the Merdeka 118 tower.

The photographs capture Mahathir at the table, his hands close to the tiles, while another brings the message into full view: I LOVE YOU.

The setting is more elaborate than the original, but Mokhzani says the essential detail remained unchanged.

His father was still too shy to say it aloud.

“Maybe because we were there,” he said.

“Old school.”

It is an extraordinary little detail to emerge after Hasmah’s passing because it gives a private face to a relationship whose public story has been told many times.

They met in 1947 as medical students at King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore. Mahathir remembered competing with five other young men to help carry Hasmah’s books. When she later struggled with a paper, he offered her free tuition.

He eventually told her he loved her, too. Hasmah would recall decades later that this was the most romantic thing he had ever done.

They married in 1956 and spent the next 70 years building a family, pursuing medical careers and navigating the demands of public life.

They argued, too. Hasmah once recalled that after a quarrel they would simply go out for a meal.

Mahathir later described tolerance as essential to a lasting marriage: accepting that the person you love is not necessarily going to change.

Perhaps the Scrabble story explains something else about them.

For all the years they spent in public view, some of the most meaningful moments belonged only to the two of them.

April 23 was one of those moments.

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