There’s no need to be sad, it’s only bricks and mortar. I don’t do regrets.

This is the house that my family have lived in for the past 29 years. There were seven of us. It has had an interesting life, this house. It has been renovated and extended several times. Its roof leaks when the wind blows in a certain direction and when it rains hard enough. It has had rats, cockroaches and various small children poke holes in its walls. It has heard screaming matches and shrieks of laughter. It has been witness to torrents of tears, fits of rages, and fierce bouts of love. Its garden is a graveyard of cats, kittens, birds, lizards, snakes and assorted small animals. This was my home.



This is our garden. There used to be a durian tree here which only bore fruit once in a blue moon, much to our family’s (and our neighbours’) disappointment. It was great for climbing though and it had a rickety swing which hung from one of its branches. Its life ended when it had to be cut down because its roots grew so huge that it cracked our front porch.


There used to be a coconut tree in this patch of the garden, but it grew the kind of coconut that wasn’t too good to eat. We tried to climb it anyway and usually ended up bitten by red ants.



Where the wet kitchen now is and its surrounding area, there used to be a storage shed, a compost heap, a starfruit tree and a papaya tree. When the developers started developing the hills behind us, we had scores of displaced monkeys and various small animals come live in our garden and eat our fruits. The monkeys also sat on our hanging laundry to eat which got me really angry because that meant we had to watch monkey butt stains off our clothes.

During one raya holiday, when we ran out of sparklers to play with, we made a little bonfire in the area near the trees. When we ran out of things to burn, we started to throw matches in, which eventually exploded and sent us running and screaming in all directions. For one moment, I thought my siblings had died. Much to my relief, every one was safe, if rather embarrassed, and only my butt was sore for the next day.
Before the house was extended, there used to be a mango tree here. As a child, I thought it seemed a rather dark and menacing tree. It was so huge, it extended over the fence and into the school next door. It had vines hanging off it but never any that were strong enough to swing from. My parents eventually had it cut down because it reached my brother’s bedroom and they were afraid snakes might get in through there.

However that did not stop the baby python that climbed through the skylight in the laundry room and hung over my dad’s head. Luckily, no one got eaten up (guess the snake was not hungry) and some fellows took it off to their Hindu temple to keep.



This porch used to have brown slippery tiles. We played hockey on it using umbrellas and our dad’s old studded capal.

The car that is parked here is our clapped out Citroen station wagon. Technically it was the kids’ car, for us kids to use. I did the most damage to it when I rear-ended another car with it. It has never worked properly since. Now it can’t go above 40km/h or more than 10km before it overheats. It’s a big shame because it has the most comfortable bucket seats which beat the seats in all the cars that I’ve ever sat in.


The kitchen and dining room used to be a different creature when I was younger. The dining room was a dark hole with no windows and you reached the kitchen through a long, narrow corridor which we used to play bowling in. The kitchen had an unlined cement floor and exposed water pipes and plumbing. You always knew if somebody was using the bathroom upstairs by the noise the pipes would make.

The banister used to be of wrought metal and it had larger gaps between the supports. We would regularly stick our heads through it, especially since our mother told us not to. My brother got his head stuck one day. Not wanting to tell our mother (because she’d say ‘I told you so’), my eldest sister got the bright idea of slathering butter on our brother’s head to grease his way out. Believe me, it was good fun rubbing all that butter in my brother’s hair as he screamed and cried himself silly.


The master bedroom was the girls’ bedroom since there are four of us, though I don’t think all four of us slept in there at the same time. We had a metal double double-decker bed which my mother told my dad not to buy (but he did anyway), which quickly became useless because it bent in the middle. Any attempts by any of us to stay on opposite sides of the bed failed because we ended up crunched up in the middle. It still has a whiff of its last occupant – cigarettes and hair products.

Most of us talk in our sleep. My eldest sister woke me up once telling me about minerals and rock formations and yelled at me because I didn’t understand what she was on about. I found out the next morning that she wanted me to turn up the air-conditioning. My younger sister mumbled threats in her sleep to kill my youngest sister. My mum would wake up and punch my dad because she had a dream that he was flirting with a young woman. I have more benign dreams; I just say, “Why don’t we get off here?”

My brother’s bedroom was the smallest but since he was the only boy, he had a room of his own. This was also where most of our toy collection was kept. We were all rabid Lego fans and we had three shelves of Lego on permanent display. One shelf depicted a medieval scene with knights, castles and Robin Hood men. Another was the futuristic shelf where we had our spaceships and astronauts and moonwalkers. The last one was the modern day one, where we had a race track, a police station, police helicopters, a hot dog stand, houses and a garage. We had set scenes and plotlines for every age and my younger sister frequently got bullied because her guy always ended up being killed. We also had Monchichi dolls (I think that’s how you spell it) brought home from our stay in the US. We had a marshmallow factory made out of an upside down tricycle and a giant unnamed doll which would regularly trash Monchichi land. We also shared a Barbie doll which we bought as an experiment. We ended up cutting her hair and made her wear ugly homemade clothes. My two younger sisters had Smurf dolls given to them when they were hospitalised. I made my youngest sister, Maryam, cry when I kicked her Smurf doll onto the sharp edge of a light fixture and its eyes came off. KJ still has hers which she jealously guards. She calls it Bluey and it sleeps on her bed still.

My parents slept in the room next door till they built another bedroom on the ground floor. I found a box of condoms in their underwear drawer when I was putting their folded clothes away. I didn’t know what they were at the time, because it had Japanese writing on the outside and a picture of some Japanese city skyline. I took one out and was disgusted because it was so slimy. It was several years later before I realised what I had found.


Once my parents built their bedroom downstairs, the balcony became more of a regular hang out place. My youngest sister had small parties up here. It was also the unofficial smoking den for my brother and sister because neither dared smoke in front of the parents. Sometimes we’d climb the roof over the kitchen unless our neighbour spotted us and start yelling for us to get down. Sometimes we’d sit on the ledge and chew the cud for a while. Sometimes we’d scoff burgers in secret.


There used to be a beautiful tree called flame-of-the-forest that grew by this drain many years ago, which perpetually shed bright red flowers. My brother fell head first into this drain when he was seven. I thought he had put flowers in his hair when I found him climbing dazedly out of the drain. I ran into the house screaming when I realised it was his blood.



We all learned to ride bicycles on this street. This was where I stupidly pressed the brakes while cycling downhill and ended up somersaulting over my bike and landing on my chin. I have the scar to this day.

So fare thee well, old house. Don't miss us too much.