every house has a story to tell
the title of this newsletter is copyrighted by one Mr. riley sager, who repeats it no less than a thousand times in his latest murder mystery ‘home before dark’ which i spent last night and most of today reading (3/5)
[before we jump into this update can i just point out that there is a VERY CURIOUS trend of male authors writing murder mysteries under gender-neutral pen names to capitalize on the gillian flynn hype? i’m not kidding. riley sager, for example, is originally a todd ritter. wow.]
anyway
as you have probably guessed from the title, this newsletter is about houses. specifically, a detached bungalow in the X6 compound of Kuala Belait, Brunei Darussalam, where i lived with my family for a few years, starting from when i was 12.
in his latest novel, riley sager née ritter writes about a haunted house, but X6 was not haunted. nevertheless, it still stands out in my memory as one of the more curious abodes i’ve lived in, not least because of the auspicious way our time in that house came to an end.
but! more on that later
i was very excited about moving into X6 because my dad told us it had three rooms. we were moving there from our 2BHK apartment in Pune, India, so three rooms sounded luxurious to me. I’d have my own room at last! this knowledge made the rest of it worth it; the packing up and moving in the middle of the school year, the leaving behind of acquaintances that were just on the verge of becoming friends…
X6 wasn’t far from my mind as we prepared to move back to Brunei. the excitement over living in our own bungalow trumped the fear of having to start all over again in a new school, in a new country, among people whom I had kinda known when I was younger but who, let’s face it, had probably forgotten about me now. even today i vividly remember shuttling down the smooth dark roads of the capital city just outside the airport in a cool grey Toyota, coldplay’s ‘Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall’ playing on a radio, thinking about the house that was to be our new home.
like most things you spend too much time looking forward to, X6 was, at first, kind of disappointing.
to begin with, it was big and empty, void of furnishing except for the bare minimum. the large double front doors were thin and flimsy and opened into an empty entrance hall, adjacent to which was a sitting room that felt even emptier despite its bare-bones sofa set. the dining table sat across from it, and then the kitchen to the side. our “backyard” was overrun with weeds; we would not be spending as much time there as i had imagined.
the room situation was slightly better. the master no doubt belonged to my parents, but i managed to bag the bigger of the remaining two rooms by the simple mechanism of calling dibs. my room was large, bigger than the one my sister and i had had to share back in India. it had two windows on adjacent walls, a small closet in the corner, a queen-sized bed and enough space left over for a desk, maybe a bookcase.
nevertheless the sad emptiness of the rest of the house hung over me like a dark cloud. i remember that first night, lying next to Didi on a makeshift mattress on the floor of our parent’s room, whispering to her about all the furniture and light fixtures we could introduce into the house to make it more home-y, to make it more ours. even then she rolled her eyes and turned away from me. “it’s not that easy,” she said.
as it turned out, it wasn’t. furnishing the house was expensive and, according to my parents, not a priority. we had school uniforms, stationery, utensils, and other utilities to think about first. and as we settled down into our new life, the expenses rose by the dozens, each of them more important than stuffing our house with bookcases, carpets, and wall hangings, like i wanted to.
in this way, two years passed in X6.
i fell in love with a boy in my class and wrote long odes to him in my journal, sitting at the desk in my room, scribbling furiously into the early hours of the morning. one friday evening, my classmate Lim and i made a model of a village at my dining table for a geography assignment, and our little misshapen clay cows infected us with a case of the giggles so severe it took us an hour to calm down. and many, many hours were spent lying in bed downloading taylor swift songs illegally from bee mp3 dot com.
for a while, we procured a TT table that was placed unwelcomingly in the entrance hall, and our weekends sounded like the hollow bouncing a ping-pong ball making its escape from my incapable hands. then the TT table was switched out for an upright piano pushed against the wall, next to a gorgeous brown guitar in a hard case that became my most prized possession.
as is the nature of houses, X6 saw me at my best and my worst, but it never became more than a house to us, no matter how much i wanted it to. it was always a little too big, a little too empty, and maybe i was a little too homesick for our 2BHK in pune where, sure, i had to share a room, but across the floor lived my best friend, and together with the other boys in the society we’d play cricket in the evenings, and go swimming in the summer.
i was lonely in brunei and lonely in X6, but time and tide wait for no lonely krys, so things carried on in this manner for a while.
until one day when Didi and i were home alone, and two strange men drove into our front yard and rang the doorbell.
our house was situated at the very end of the X6 compound, so we usually got folks who ended up at the wrong address and needed directions. i was lying in bed texting with a friend when the doorbell went. Didi was at the desktop computer in the living room. i went to the front of the house, and through the double windows in the entrance hall saw the two men who had entered our driveway.
i almost opened the front door, but didi said, “wait.”
i waited. Ma was at school a half-hour away, attending a staff meeting. before leaving she had reminded us, as always, not to open the door to strangers, and it was these words that were ringing in my ears now.
one of the men went to the window, cupped his hands around his face, and peeked in.
super weird behaviour. Didi moved away from the desktop computer and towards me. “what are they doing?”
the other man, or maybe it was the same one, grabbed a stick that was left in the front porch and tried jamming it between the front doors, while his partner quickly made his away around the house, peeking into every window.
now it was pretty evident what they were doing.
they were trying to break in.
the first thing i did was run into my bedroom and draw the curtains. i don’t know why and can acknowledge now what a weird knee-jerk reaction this was. then we heard a sound from the back door. was it locked? we didn’t know. i ran back into the front of the house. Didi looked terrified. “we need to get into your room,” i said. hers was the smaller of the two, and maybe the safer. i didn’t know if they knew we were in here, and i didn’t want to find out. inexplicably, i grabbed my mother’s iPad from the living room couch, before Didi and i locked ourselves up in her bedroom.
we had our phones with us. “CALL THE POLICE!” i shouted. Didi called papa first.
at that point my dad was in India, receiving treatment for a rare blood disease that he had been diagnosed with just a few months prior, so you will appreciate how ridiculous this decision was. somehow, it ended up being the right one. Papa’s panicked advice was, obviously, to call the police, but after we hung up, he also called his colleague and friend who lived ten minutes away. and then he called Ma.
Didi called the police and tearfully related our predicament and address. in the meantime, the rest of the house was silent. with our curtains drawn and our door locked, we couldn’t tell what was going on. maybe we were out of danger. thinking along the same lines, Didi bravely unlocked the door, opened it enough to squeeze out, and tip-toed into the living room.
she saw one of the men sitting on the sofa, his back turned to us.
she ran back in and shut the door. “they’re inside.”
we cowered against the bedroom door, scared out of our minds. we had watched Taken. multiple times. we thought we knew what was going to happen next.
and like clockwork, there was a knock on the door.
we screamed.
and when we paused for breath, heard: “it’s okay. it’s me.”
my dad’s friend had entered through the open back door and was standing outside my sister’s bedroom. he told us to wait while he ensured the house was empty. five minutes later he returned.
the coast was clear.
my mum arrived twenty minutes later, and the police twenty minutes after that.
the robbers had fled just before my dad’s friend pulled up at our house. they got away with some of my mum’s jewellery and cash. i remember thinking, dazedly, that they would have taken the iPad too had i not grabbed it first.
the Police took a description of the two men and the car they drove from my sister and I, and promised to situate a patrol in the area should the men come back. we never saw any such patrol that evening.
not that we were looking. we were too busy packing.
the very next morning, Ma, Didi and I moved out of X6 and into a cramped 1BHK in the staff quarters behind our school.
the new house was unfurnished, but not isolated. we were quite literally in the backyard of our school, in between the basketball court and the computer lab. Didi and i were so shaken from our nightmarish experience that the compactness of the house was a blessing to us. i could sit on the couch in the living room and see all the way into the bedroom, the kitchen and the back door. and there was comfort in that.
i did go back to X6 one more time after we moved away. there was a box of things left in the kitchen that Ma and i needed to pick up. it must have been a week after the robbery, a Saturday, when we drove down.
we entered through the front door. the house was empty now, save for the furniture that was too big to transport. i remember looking around and thinking i wouldn’t miss it.
mum called for me from the kitchen, and i followed her voice to find her standing anxiously in front of the sink. “was the kitchen door left open, the last time we were here?”
i paused. “i don’t remember.”
“because it was open just now. and i distinctly remember closing it before we left.”
and so we hightailed it out of there.
it’s hilarious to think of now, and Ma and i can’t narrate this story without laughing ourselves sore. but it’s stuck with me.
you don’t realise how much you rely on your home to provide you with a sense of safety, until it’s taken away from you. i can no longer think of X6 as my home without picturing those two men who broke into it. it was by no means a good home, but it was mine, until it wasn’t.
these days i’m content with a small home and a shared bedroom, if that means i get to sleep at night without worrying about strange men sitting on my living room sofa. sometimes it really is the little things.
so! that was the story of X6, and the robbery that Didi and i survived. possibly chapter two of my biography. who knows?
before signing off i just want to say that writing this newsletter has been just about the nicest part of my year. i love sending out little updates to you guys, my friends, my favourite people. i love hearing back from you, be it by email or by text, or when we meet in person and i tell you something and you say “oh yes, i read about that in your newsletter!”
thank you so much.
x