《Dinner with Death》

Chapter 7: The Weaponization of Death

I was fourteen when I learned that death could be weaponized—not just as a final ending, but as a tool for control, a threat used to keep the living in their place.

The third death I witnessed that year was not a person. It was a marriage. My uncle—the quiet one, the one who had always seemed trapped in a life he didn't choose—finally reached his breaking point. His wife had been cheating on him for years, a scandalous secret that everyone in the neighborhood whispered about, yet no one in our house dared to acknowledge. The family rule was as rigid as the dark wood of the cupboard: what happened inside these walls stayed inside these walls, even when the walls themselves were crumbling into dust.

He found out the truth on a humid Sunday morning, the air thick with the scent of rain and impending storms. By Monday morning, he was gone. He didn't die—not yet—but he vanished. He packed a single, worn leather bag, left a note on the dining table that said absolutely nothing and yet everything at once, and drove away before the first rooster crowed.

I remember the fallout. My grandmother didn't weep for his pain; she called him a coward for "disrupting the order." My other uncles called him ungrateful, as if leaving a lie was an act of treason. I, however, called him free. For a few glorious weeks, I looked at his empty chair and saw a possibility I had never dared to imagine. He was the first adult in that house who had ever chosen to walk away from the suffocating weight of the Su name. I didn't know where he went, but I envied the sheer, terrifying courage it must have taken to abandon the only cage he had ever known.

But two months later, the cage door swung shut again. My uncle came back. He didn't return out of love or longing; he returned because his wife's family had weaponized his life against him. They threatened to take the house, the savings, and most importantly, the children. He was dragged back to a marriage that was already a rotting corpse, and he was forced to live inside it like a ghost.

I watched him during our mandatory family dinners. His eyes were hollow, like two burnt-out stars. His hands moved mechanically, lifting rice to his mouth with a rhythmic, joyless precision. He had escaped the house on Jalan TK 3/14, briefly, and they had hunted him down and brought him back to be an example. That was when I understood the true, dark purpose of this family: it wasn't a sanctuary designed to love or protect. It was a vessel designed to contain. It existed to ensure that no one ever truly got away, no matter the cost to their soul.

That same year, the boy who lived three doors down—a gentle soul named Arif—died in a motorcycle accident on the main road. He was only seventeen. I had spoken to him exactly once, at a neighborhood gathering where the air was filled with the smoke of satay and the sound of distant radios. We had talked about nothing important—the weather, the school exams, the heat. But he had looked at me with a kindness that was foreign in my own home. He didn't look at me like I was a broken miracle or a difficult secret. He looked at me like I was just a person.

His funeral was the first one I attended alone, without the permission or the presence of my grandmother. I stood at the back of the small, local cemetery, wearing clothes that weren't black because I didn't own a single scrap of mourning cloth. I watched his mother collapse at the graveside, her grief raw and unpolished. I watched his friends lean on each other, their faces wet with tears they didn't try to hide.

As the imam recited prayers that sounded like music I didn't understand, I felt a sharp realization pierce through my chest. Death was everywhere. It wasn't just a hidden document in my grandmother's cupboard; it was the one thing that connected every house on this street, the one certainty we all shared. And yet, in my house, we lied about it. We acted as if death were a shameful mistake that needed to be managed, explained away, or contained within a bureaucratic file. We acted like it had to make sense.

I walked home from Arif's funeral as the sky turned a bruised, heavy gray. The streets of Jalan TK 3/14 were unnervingly quiet. I thought about Arif, whose life was taken by a genuine accident, and I thought about the people in my own family. My father. My uncle. The cousin whose name I still could not bring myself to write in my secret notes. I thought about that convenient, clean word they used: Accident.

He fell. He drowned. He crashed.

It was a perfect excuse. It removed all responsibility. It silenced all questions. If it was an accident, there was no one to blame, no motive to find, and no truth to uncover. But I was learning that in a house built on lies, even the accidents were orchestrated.

That was the year I stopped believing in the concept of a coincidence. Too many of my kin had met their ends in ways that were too convenient for the family’s estate. My father's "sudden illness." My uncle's "accidental fall." My cousin's "unexpected drowning." It was a pattern, a series of chapters in a book my grandmother had been writing long before I was born. She was the author of our history, deciding whose stories were told in the light and whose were buried in the margins. She decided what was a tragedy and what was simply never to be spoken of again.

In her eyes, I was just a footnote. A small, inconvenient detail at the bottom of a page she kept trying to erase.

But footnotes are persistent things. They are small, yes. They are easy to overlook while the main story is being shouted from the rooftops. But they are still there, clinging to the edge of the narrative, refusing to be silenced. I was fourteen years old, and I was writing my own story in the margins of hers. I was the piece of the machine that refused to turn, the witness who wouldn't stop remembering.

I began to see the house on Jalan TK 3/14 not as a home, but as a living creature that swallowed people whole. It had consumed my father's ambition, my uncle's spirit, and my aunt's sanity. It took everything and offered nothing but a cold, incense-scented silence in return. But it could not swallow me. It tried—with its locked cupboards, its hidden medical files, and the crushing weight of my grandmother’s expectations that pressed down on my lungs like a permanent asthma attack.

I was still here. I was still breathing the air they tried to thin. I was still writing names on scraps of paper in the dead of night, documenting the inconsistencies in their alibis. I was becoming the one thing they feared most: a record-keeper. Someone who could not be gaslit into forgetting.

I was fourteen, and I had already stood over more graves than most adults I knew. But I was not the one being buried. That was the difference between me and the black-and-white photographs on the altar. They had accepted their roles in my grandmother's play. They had allowed themselves to be contained and erased.

I, however, was already leaking through the cracks. I didn't know then that it would take me five more long, agonizing years to finally walk through that front gate and never look back. I didn't know how much more blood and silence I would have to endure. But as I lay in the dark that night, listening to the house creak like a ship lost at sea, I knew I would survive. I had survived the incubator, the kitchen floors, and the truth about my father’s name. I was the footnote that was about to become the whole story. And the house knew it. I could feel its walls trembling around me as I wrote one more name in the dark.