On a quiet Sunday morning in May last year, as the Menon family drove to a house viewing in Singapore, a phone rang with a foreign country code and refused to stop.
By the time someone picked up, Arjun Menon – former Singapore cricketer, SEA Games gold medal-winning coach, and the man who had thrown his lot in with Malawi’s cricket dream – was dead.
He was 48.
A Brother Before a Coach
To the wider sporting world, Arjun was the coach who lifted standards, the man on the boundary rope barking instructions and quietly reshaping teams.
To his older sister Prema, he was still the “cool kid” from Neptune Court. The eldest of three, the boy who played with her in the corridors of their childhood home, and the man who grew into someone who lived by a simple rule: never punch down.
As adults, the three siblings scattered. Prema settled in Australia. Arjun moved to Africa, basing himself in Malawi from 2020 as he tried to build up the game there. Their younger sister stayed in Singapore.
They were, as Prema put it, “like orbiting satellites” – distant, but always in each other’s sky.
That orbit shattered with one call.
On the line from Blantyre, Malawi’s second-largest city, Arjun’s wife screamed down the connection. Arjun, head coach of Malawi’s national cricket team, had been killed at home by unknown assailants. His car and wallet were gone.
The rest of the day moved in slow motion.
Prema remembers only one thought cutting through the shock: her parents.
“My father used to say … the biggest curse is losing your child,” she recalled. “All I could think of was my parents. I didn't really care about myself.”
“How do we come back from this?”
More than a year later, the question still hangs there, unanswered.
A Killing Without Answers
Arjun had embraced Malawi. He spoke to his father every day and, by all accounts, felt safe, rooted, welcomed.
“He was very well loved in the community,” his father believed. There had been no talk of threats. No sense of danger.
When news of the killing came, Prema prepared to fly almost 18 hours to a landlocked country in southeastern Africa she barely knew. She stayed about 10 days in Malawi – enough time to lay her brother to rest and to begin the fight for clarity.
The family had no contacts, no understanding of the local system. They turned to the president of Cricket Malawi, where Arjun had worked as head of cricket operations, to liaise with police.
The updates, when they came, were maddeningly uniform.
“They’re still investigating.”
No suspects named. No arrests known. No explanation for why a national coach, loved in his adopted community, was attacked in his own home at 2am.
From Melbourne, where she now lives and works as operations director for a non-profit organisation, Prema has spent months staring into that void.
“It is so hard for me to sit here and know that me, my father especially, my sister and my late mother suffered this sort of violation, and nobody has the answer for it,” she said.
“I just want someone to answer for this crime, the person who did it. They shouldn't be able to walk around like nothing has happened.”
Lost in the System
The Menons turned wherever they could.
Singapore has no diplomatic presence in Malawi. The nearest embassy is in South Africa, limiting what officials can do on the ground.
The family approached the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Singapore Police Force and several Members of Parliament. The MFA could help with liaison and paperwork, but not investigate, give legal advice or file a police report abroad. Those are hard limits of jurisdiction.
Singapore police told CNA they had contacted authorities in Malawi and stood ready to assist within Singapore law if a formal request came. As of Aug 31, no such request had been received.
Repeated attempts by CNA to reach Malawi police went unanswered. MFA declined to comment.
Inside that silence, the family tried to push the case forward on their own.
In December, six months after Arjun’s death, another blow landed. Prema’s mother died. The search for answers paused while the family absorbed a second loss.
When Prema resumed in July, she called Malawian officers directly. One officer told her he had sent a report to the Singapore embassy months earlier. When she finally saw it, routed via MFA, the date told a different story: Jul 31, after her call.
The report contained nothing new. The line stayed the same: police were still investigating.
In August, a new investigating officer finally offered more detail. CCTV footage had been reviewed. Call logs checked. Nothing.
It wasn’t progress in the way families crave, but at least it confirmed one thing – the case had not been formally abandoned.
Even so, Prema felt she was pulling information out of a system that rarely reached back.
The family had identified themselves to Malawi police through MFA. Yet most updates came only when she chased them.
She found herself trying to navigate an unfamiliar bureaucracy without a map.
“I just think we need help. There's something missing here to get us to the next stage, and I don't think a private citizen can do it on their own."
Grief in Public, and in Private
In July this year, Prema did something that would have felt unthinkable in those first numb weeks: she took her search public.
On Instagram, she began documenting the struggle – the calls, the dead ends, the small breakthroughs.
“Right now, if you're unlucky enough to lose someone in a country without a Singapore embassy ... you figure it out as you go, through calls, emails, and a lot of trial and error, the same way I did,” she wrote.
The posts are part advocacy, part survival.
As more Singaporeans move to work and live in countries with limited diplomatic ties, she believes cases like Arjun’s will not be isolated. To her, this is not about blaming any one official or agency, but exposing a gap in the system that families are left to discover the hardest way.
The Instagram page also gives her a space to grieve the life that might have been.
“He was there from the very beginning. He's my first friend, your sibling … It's very different from the loss of my mum because a loss of a sibling is like losing a part of your body. Like it's no longer there.”
Her inbox now holds long voice notes and messages from people who knew Arjun – some running five minutes, some just a few lines – all carrying the same theme: he changed their lives.
A Legacy Beyond the Scoreboard
At the end of August, friends in Singapore decided to honour him the way he had lived: through sport and service.
They organised a charity cricket and football tournament at Singapore Cricket Club in his name. By Sep 14 evening, more than S$13,000 had been raised on Give.Asia.
Most of that money will go to the Maoni Orphanage in Malawi and the Vivekananda Cultural Centre in Singapore – two places that reflect the worlds Arjun straddled and the communities he cared about.
In Hindu belief, Prema says, when your time and purpose in this world are done, you are called back. It is a way to make sense of sudden loss.
“Sometimes I like to believe that,” she admitted. “But when I hear these stories, it's very hard to believe because I feel like he has so much more to do.”
Arjun once told their father he wanted to buy a farm when he retired. It sounded like a distant dream then. Now it feels like a stolen one.
Most people will remember him for what he did with bat, ball and clipboard. He represented Singapore, then coached the national team to SEA Games gold in 2017. He went to Malawi not for glamour, but for the grind of building something from the ground up.
Prema wants the memory to stretch beyond the trophies.
She talks about his values – the way he felt things deeply, loved fiercely, made friends across boundaries and refused to put himself above others.
“Lastly, my hope is that as much as Arjun loved Malawi, I hope some of that love is returned,” she said.
“For his death to go unanswered in a country he loved so much, I feel is a very sad way to end things.”
The investigation file remains open. The family’s questions do too.
