I SAT quietly in the Times House canteen reading the last chapters of the 680-page memoirs of Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew. For two hours now, my chee cheong fun breakfast and tea had grown cold, as I was transported into another, more exciting world.

July 21, 1964 -- the day race riots broke out between the Malays and the Chinese. It all happened four years before I was born.

Mr Lee cites documentary evidence to back his belief that the riots were instigated by Malay extremists in the United Malays National Organisation (Umno), the Malay interest political party, to discredit the Singapore Government, especially its brash young Prime Minister Lee.

He described the July 1964 riots thus: "Racial passions had been aroused, and mayhem had broken loose. The news, distorted and exaggerated, soon spread by word of mouth. All over the island, Malays began killing Chinese, and Chinese retaliated. The casualties came to 23 dead and 454 injured, and when the body count was made at the mortuary there were as many Malay as there were Chinese victims."

These bald statements chilled my spine. Suddenly, loud jangles and an incessant siren broke the air around me, its urgent peals ringing in my brain.

For one brief, insane moment, the thought ran through my head: Riots all over again? I shook off the frisson of fear. No, it was a benign siren -- the civil defence alarm to familiarise citizens with the sounds of an emergency.

I looked around. It was a bright, sunny day and traffic hummed busily outside on Kim Seng Road. September 1998, and this was calm, ordered, multi-racial Singapore.

The riots belonged to the past.

Yet, if there is one thing Mr Lee's book tries to impress on its readers, it is that there is no guarantee riots will not take place in the future.

The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew is quite a page-turner, reading at times like a political thriller, with its accounts of the twists and turns of political battles, of manipulations, plots and violence. But it is no fiction.

The events narrated happened, as did the bouts of ugly violence between races which scarred a young state.

If there is one theme that runs through the book, one message which resonates, it is this: That there was nothing inevitable about Singapore's survival, nothing inevitable about its success and certainly nothing inevitable which will safeguard its future prosperity.

Each turn in Singapore's history, each battle won, was the result of conscious choice and careful decisions by those leading the country and its citizens.

A second, running theme: That this harmony among the races my generation takes so much for granted was a hard-won, fragile peace.

Mr Lee warns about the perils of racial chauvinism -- especially the kind of Malay extremism espoused by those he calls "Umno ultras" -- right-wing Malay extremists who stoke up Malay passions using Malay tradition and language.

In case there was any doubt about it, his book explains clearly the difference in thinking between Malaysia's Umno-dominated system which safeguards the special position of the Malay population by setting aside quotas in jobs, education and business, and Singapore's meritocratic system as practised by the People's Action Party Government which gives equal opportunities to all, regardless of race, and rewards on the basis of merit.

Like many other young Singaporeans, especially those born after Independence, I grew up taking racial harmony, peace and stability for granted.

These were words we uttered in pledges in school, which in our adult years we came to understand, and affirm.

But I think many of us found it difficult to believe the political leaders' explanations that underneath the calm, the fault lines of race, language and religion remained.

Perhaps they were using race as a bogeyman again, these politicians, to justify the tight reins of control they wanted over the population?

But no, Mr Lee and the older generation know that the fault lines remain.

While reading the book, I came to appreciate that 1964 and 1969 -- the years of the race riots -- were still in living memory. Those who rioted then, or felt its impact, would be those from around 50 onwards. Plenty of them are still around.

Could the mistrust and fears of one generation be wiped out totally in the next? Or were I and my generation living in a fool's paradise, believing that because we did not feel racial hatred, others also would not?

Reading Mr Lee's memoirs did not shake my humanist conviction that colour should not matter. My friends and I grew up making friends across the races and later, across the world. What did it matter if one was black, brown, yellow or white? We all belonged to the larger entity called humanity.

I still abide by those beliefs.

But eight years as a political journalist have led me to understand that people need a more immediate and direct cultural identity to affiliate themselves too.

So we are Chinese, Indian, Malay, Eurasian, English, Scottish, Croatian and so on.

I came away from Mr Lee's memoirs with a sense of heightened racial consciousness. I am not sure if that was a good thing, although I am glad I have a better understanding today of just how and why my Malaysian cousins' lives differ from my own.

More than that, I came away from the book with a clearer understanding of just how close and many were the shaves Singapore had had in its chequered history.

We could have become a country of fragmented races each with its own political channel to power. We could have become a communist-run Third World republic.

We could have limped along as sovereign Singapore in name, surviving on the economic dregs of neighbouring countries. We could have remained part of the Malaysian Federation, in a looser constitutional arrangement.

The permutations are many.

Mr Lee's memoirs recount them and show clearly, starkly, that there was nothing pre-ordained about Singapore's survival or success, and that if it turned out this way, it was because of the decisions of a group of tough-minded young men led by a decidedly truculent character in the person of Lee Kuan Yew.

With the recent accusations of Malaysian leaders that Mr Lee was writing his own personal, biased account of history fresh on my mind, I did what any history student would do, with limited time and resources: a quick check of what Mr Lee said against established history texts.

But of course Mr Lee's account squared with the sources.

He had a team of researchers to ferret through papers and check facts.

In addition, the book is not an official history and should not be read as such. Others will have different interpretations and history may judge the PAP's track record in the merger years differently.

As Mr Lee said during the launch of his book: "It is my account of what I did, why I did it and about the people who worked with me or against me."

Besides, Mr Lee has staked his credibility on the accuracy of his memoirs.

Only a fool would crown a lifetime of achievement with memoirs that are inaccurate or self-aggrandising. Mr Lee has been accused of many things -- wont to "bluff, bully and blackmail" his way around to get what he wants, as British Commonwealth Relations Secretary of State Duncan Sandys once observed acidly to his Prime Minister Harold Macmillan -- but no one could possibly call him a fool.

That niggling intellectual doubt set aside, I sat back to enjoy this remarkable man's story of his life.

He tells his story with aplomb and an immediacy that brings people and events vividly before the reader. His is a fascinating story and he tells it well, with the innate skills of a consummate story-teller. It should be of interest to every Singaporean, fan or foe of Mr Lee, because it gives glimpses into the thinking and personal life of the man who shaped this nation's history.

He comes across in his writing as a man of action, not much given to introspection, whose reflections are on issues such as power, governance or political strategy, rather than on philosophical questions of existence and meaning.

His writing is clear and vivid, but the book retains a certain opacity, as there are few descriptions of emotions, so that one is hard put to know what Lee Kuan Yew felt, feared, hated or loved during the events he describes. What Mr Lee does write about with some candour is his courtship of his wife Geok Choo.

His account of their time together is alight with romance and humour, reminding younger readers that stern patriarch and elder statesman though he may be, SM was a young man in love once upon a time -- like you, like me.

There are some lovely vignettes, including one of a young Harry Lee arguing that Girton College should accept his lady friend Miss Kwa because she used to top him in school, and since he got a First, she probably would too and would do the college proud. (He got her the place).

It was also refreshing to know that Mrs Lee, who remains a discreet, quiet presence beside her forceful husband in public life, is a strong-willed, strong-minded woman who loved her man enough to defy social conventions of her day to promise to wait for him without a public betrothal, and then to marry him secretly without her parents' knowledge.

As I closed the book, the battles against the communists and the machinations to get Singapore into merger and then out of it fresh in my mind, I felt as though I had been given a ringside view of history, and my country's history too. My mind worried over the import of the book like a dog worrying over a bone.

In the end, I think I came away with a greater appreciation of one thing: How differently Singapore could have turned out. Then, that alarm that jolted me out of my reverie this week might not have been just a civil defence drill, but a siren heralding the outbreak of another bout of riots.