Beneath a canvas canopy fringed with silver bells, four black sandstone idols rest on a rotting wooden table, their torsos wrapped reverently in saffron and yellow cloth. A teenage priest, stripped to the waist and hair slicked back, hangs back, waiting for evening prayers to begin.
This makeshift shrine in the yard of a rented house in the city of Shah Alam, 25km from Kuala Lumpur, is a faint echo of the Sri Maha Mariamman temple, which stood for more than 50 years on a parcel of government land behind the house. Last November, a demolition crew moved in to tear down the temple and a community of about 200 predominantly Hindu households who had lived there for decades.
Armed with a court order, the crew arrived with riot police who arrested several residents and activists who resisted. The statues were rescued before the excavators reduce the temple to rubble.
Krishnan Ponnusamy, 50, a market trader, was among those arrested and later released without charge. He is unmoved by the legal might of the authorities who spent three years trying to evict the slum community, arguing that his family had staked a claim to the land and that their temple was a consecrated place. 'This is Indian property. This temple is our right, it was built by our forefathers,' he said.
For poor Indians living on the fringe of Malaysia's booming consumer society, the temple demolition in Shah Alam - carried out just days before the holy festival of Diwali - was the last straw. Whipped into action by an ambitious group of Indian lawyers who called themselves the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) and spoke of 'ethnic cleansing' and the systematic destruction of Hindu places of worship in Malaysia, about 20,000 Indians took to the streets of Kuala Lumpur.
The November 25 rally was the second large anti-government demonstration in a month and a direct challenge to the authorities. For several hours, police using chemical-laced water cannons and tear gas fought running battles with the protesters. Racial tensions that Malaysia has long sought to keep at bay were on full display, as an overwhelmingly Malay-Muslim police force clashed with unarmed, taunting young Indian men.