《Dinner with Death》

Chapter 2: The House on Jalan TK 3/14

The house on Jalan TK 3/14 was older than any of us, a weary structure of weathered brick and fading paint that felt less like a home and more like a silent witness to a century of secrets. Its walls had soaked up decades of heavy cigarette smoke, bitter incense ash, and family arguments that never truly ended—they just paused briefly for meals, only to resume once the plates were cleared. In that house, the air always felt thick, as if the memories of the people who had lived there before were crowding the hallways, jostling for space with the living.

My grandmother ruled that house from a worn, cracked leather armchair in the corner of the living room. It was her throne, situated in a spot where she could see both the front gate and the kitchen door. A cigarette was perpetually burning between her yellowed fingers, the thin trail of smoke rising like a signal fire. She did not need to raise her voice to command authority; a single, sharp glance from her clouded eyes could silence a room full of grown men. I learned to read her moods by the way she flicked her ash before I ever learned to read the alphabet. In that house, survival depended on understanding the weather of her face.

My uncles filled the space like unpredictable storm clouds—loud, heavy, and quick to shift from laughter to raw anger. They wrestled on the living room floor like overgrown children, argued about money they didn't have, and would disappear for days into the humid Malaysian nights. When they returned, they brought with them the smell of cheap beer, exhaust fumes, and a restlessness that made the hair on my neck stand up. My father was the quiet anomaly among them. He was the shadow that moved through the house at dawn and returned long after I was supposed to be asleep. He spoke to me in short, clipped sentences that I collected like rare coins and stored in the treasury of my mind. "Do well in school." "Don't trouble your grandmother." "I'm proud of you." That last sentence, he only said once. I was eight years old, standing on the porch under a relentless sun. I remember it because I went to my room and wrote it down on the inside cover of a textbook so I wouldn't lose it.

The family altar stood in the front hall, a carved wooden shrine crowded with photographs of ancestors I had never met. Their black-and-white faces stared out from ornate, dusty frames, their expressions frozen in a permanent state between judgment and indifference. My grandmother lit incense every morning and evening, the red tips glowing like angry eyes in the dim light. She would bow three times, whispering prayers in a dialect I barely understood—a language of the past that had no place in the world of the future I was trying to build. I asked her once who she was praying for, and she didn't even look at me. "The living," she had said, her voice like dry parchment. "The dead don't need prayers; they are already beyond the reach of this world's cruelty. The living... the living need all the help they can get." I did not understand the weight of those words then. Now, they are the only truth I believe in.

There were rules in that house that were never spoken aloud, yet they were more binding than any law. Never ask about your mother. Never mention the uncle who fled to the Philippines in the middle of the night. Never, under any circumstances, tell anyone outside the family what happens behind the iron gate of Jalan TK 3/14. I broke that last rule exactly once when I was six years old. I told a primary school teacher that my uncle had thrown a wooden chair at the wall during a fight. The teacher, concerned, called home.

The aftermath was a lesson I would never forget. My grandmother apologized to the teacher over the phone with a voice like honey, claiming children have overactive imaginations. But when she hung up and sat me down, her voice was so calm it terrified me more than any shouting ever could. "We are all we have," she whispered, her hand gripping my small shoulder. "If you betray the family, you betray yourself. Outside these walls, you are nothing. Inside, you are a Su." I never broke that rule again. Not until I was nineteen years old, sitting in a cramped, rented room in Kuala Lumpur, typing the very words you are reading now on a screen that they will never see.

The kitchen was the only warm place in that house of ice. My grandfather was the guardian of that warmth. He stood over a gas stove that had been there since before I was born, his back hunched from years of labor. He made the same dishes his mother had taught him in a village across the sea—soy sauce chicken that smelled of star anise, stir-fried vegetables with garlic, and rice porridge with century eggs for the days when my stomach was weak. He never used recipes; his hands moved by a secret, ancient instinct. "Cooking is like remembering," he told me as he chopped ginger with rhythmic precision. "You just have to pay attention to the details."

He fed me before anyone else, a secret rebellion against the hierarchy of the house. He would set aside a small plate just for me, hidden in the back of the refrigerator, ensuring that no matter how late I returned from school or how loud the arguments in the living room became, there would be something warm waiting for me. That was his love language—silent, nourishing, and hidden. He never said the words, but he kept the plate full, and that was enough to keep my heart from turning into stone.

It was my grandfather who taught me how to ride a bicycle on the cracked asphalt of our street, his hand steady on the seat until I found my balance. He was the one who walked me to school on my very first day, holding my hand so tightly I could feel the calluses on his palm. When my asthma flared up and the world felt like it was shrinking until I couldn't pull air into my lungs, he was the one who sat by my bed in the dark. His rough hand would rest on my forehead, his voice a steady anchor in the sea of my panic. "Don't be afraid," he would whisper. "You've survived worse than a little thin air." He was right. I had survived being removed from the womb. I had survived the incubator. But the fear never truly left me; I just learned to wear it like a second skin.

The photographs on the wall were my first lesson in the mythology of our bloodline. Two portraits hung slightly higher than the rest—my father's older brothers, the uncles I never met. One died before I was born; the other died when I was too young to hold a memory. No one talked about how they died. They were treated as saints, their flaws buried with them, leaving only the reverent tones reserved for the dead who cannot speak back to defend their humanity. My father never looked at those photographs. He would walk past the altar with his head down, as if the eyes in the frames were too heavy to bear.

At night, the house creaked and groaned as if it were having a long, agonizing conversation with its own foundations. I lay in my small bed, tucked under a mosquito net that felt like a fragile veil between me and the world, and listened. I learned to distinguish every sound—the hum of the television, the sharp click of my grandmother’s lighter, the specific footstep of each uncle on the stairs. I learned who was coming before they ever reached my door. I learned when it was safe to breathe and when I needed to hold my breath.

There was a tall, dark wooden cupboard in the hallway that was strictly forbidden. My grandmother kept her life there—birth certificates, medical records, the land deeds that held our family’s dwindling wealth. I never questioned the lock until years later. When I finally opened that cupboard, I didn't just find paper; I found the truth. I found the blank space where my father's name should have been. I found the asthma diagnosis that had been used to keep me fragile. I found the beginning of my own story, hidden away like a shameful secret. That cupboard taught me the most important lesson of all: the things people hide from you are the things that give them power over you.

But I am getting ahead of myself. In my mind, I am still that six-year-old girl. I am still learning to read the tension in a room before anyone speaks. I am still watching my grandfather cook, still listening to the house creak in the dark, still believing that if I am quiet enough and helpful enough, I might finally earn a love that doesn't come with an invoice attached. I do not yet know that the scalpel I am becoming will one day cut through every silence and every carefully constructed lie in this house.

The house on Jalan TK 3/14 is still there. I drove past it once, years later, a ghost returning to a graveyard. The paint had peeled away like dead skin, and the gate was a mess of orange rust. Someone else's laundry hung from the balcony where I used to hide. I did not stop. I did not need to. That house no longer owns me, but the girl who learned to survive it is still here, and she is finally ready to tell the truth.