The Tragic Death of Arjun Menon: A Coach's Legacy
On a quiet Sunday morning in May last year, a family on their way to a house viewing in Singapore let an unfamiliar overseas number ring out.
It rang again. And again.
When the youngest sibling finally picked up, the world that the Menon family knew ended with a scream down the line from Africa.
Arjun is dead.
The boy from Neptune Court
To most people, Arjun Menon was the coach who helped shape cricket in two continents – a former Singapore international who guided his country to SEA Games gold in 2017, and later the head of cricket operations in Malawi, where he took charge of the national team.
To his older sister Prema, he was first the “cool kid” in Neptune Court. The eldest of three, the brother who played with her in the corridors, who lived by one simple rule: never punch down.
They grew up, scattered, and became what she calls “orbiting satellites” – Prema in Australia, Arjun in Africa, their younger sister in Singapore. Different time zones, different lives, tied together by family calls and the comfort of knowing the others were out there.
In 2020, Arjun moved to Malawi, the landlocked nation in southeastern Africa, determined to lift its cricket community. He settled in Blantyre, the country’s second-largest city, embraced by a sport that often survives on passion more than money.
He loved it there. He told his family he felt safe. He told his father he dreamed of one day buying a farm for his retirement.
Then, in the early hours of a May morning in 2025, unknown assailants entered his home. The 48-year-old coach was attacked at around 2am. His car and wallet were taken. He did not survive.
“The biggest curse is losing your child”
Prema remembers that first numb stretch of time in fragments.
“I was just in shock,” she said over a Zoom call from Melbourne in mid-August. “My father used to say the biggest curse is losing your child, and all I could think of was my parents. I didn't really care about myself.”
Her mind went straight to them: How do we come back from this?
Within days, she was on a plane to Malawi – an 18-hour journey into a country she barely knew, to bury a brother she still half-expected to see at the arrivals hall.
She stayed about 10 days. Long enough to lay him to rest. Not nearly long enough to understand what had happened.
Her father, who spoke to Arjun every day, was convinced the attackers were strangers. In Blantyre, the coach was “very well loved in the community”. Arjun had never mentioned threats, never said he felt unsafe. He adored the place.
The family leaned on the president of Cricket Malawi to deal with the local police. They waited for answers.
They kept hearing the same line: “They’re still investigating.”
A family left chasing shadows
From Singapore, the Menons turned to every avenue they could find.
They contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They spoke to the Singapore Police Force. They reached out to Members of Parliament.
They discovered the limits of what any of them could do.
Singapore has no diplomatic representation in Malawi. The nearest embassy is in South Africa. According to MFA guidelines, the ministry can help liaise with foreign authorities and provide a list of undertakers. It cannot investigate deaths overseas, give legal advice, or file police reports on behalf of families.
The Singapore Police Force said it had contacted authorities in Malawi and would assist within the scope of Singapore law if a formal request came through. As of Aug 31, no such request had been received from Malawi.
The Malawi police did not respond to repeated requests for comment. MFA declined to comment.
For the Menon family, the silence felt like a second loss.
“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,” said Prema, now an operations director at a non-profit. “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.”
The investigation, on paper, continued. In reality, progress crawled.
Grief on two fronts
Six months after Arjun’s killing, another blow landed.
In December, Prema’s mother died.
The search for answers had to pause. The family was now grieving two losses, with only one body buried and the other story still unfinished.
Prema stepped back, then picked up the trail again in July this year. This time, she bypassed intermediaries and called Malawian officers herself.
One officer told her he had sent a report to the Singapore High Commission months earlier. When she finally obtained it through MFA, she saw the date: Jul 31. It had gone out only after her call.
The report contained nothing new. The case remained “under investigation”.
Then, in August, a small crack of light. A new investigating officer informed her that CCTV footage and call logs had been checked. Nothing had emerged. No suspects. No clear leads.
It was hardly the breakthrough she wanted, but it at least confirmed the file had not been quietly closed.
Even so, she felt she was doing the chasing.
The family had identified themselves to Malawi police through MFA. Yet most of what they learned came from her own calls and emails, not from any formal update.
Navigating an unfamiliar system from another continent, without local contacts or clear instructions on which department to approach, left her feeling adrift.
"I just think we need help,” she said. “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."
Turning to the public
In July, she opened another front: social media.
On Instagram, she began documenting the search – not as a campaign against any one agency, but as a way to show the gaps that appear when a Singaporean dies violently in a country without a Singapore embassy.
“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.
With more Singaporeans living and working in far-flung places, she believes her family’s ordeal will not be unique. The systems, she feels, have not yet caught up with that reality.
The Instagram page also became something more personal: a place to lay out her grief.
“He was there from the very beginning. He's my first friend, your sibling,” she said. “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.”
The messages started coming.
Voice notes up to five minutes long. Stories from former teammates, students, colleagues. Accounts of lives altered by a coach who pushed hard, cared deeply and refused to look down on anyone.
A life measured in impact
At the end of August, those memories moved onto the field.
Friends organised a charity cricket and football tournament at Singapore Cricket Club in Arjun’s honour. By the evening of Sep 14, more than S$13,000 had been raised on Give.Asia.
Most of the money will go to Maoni Orphanage in Malawi and the Vivekananda Cultural Centre in Singapore – two communities that reflect the twin poles of his life.
On paper, Arjun’s legacy is straightforward. He played for Singapore. He coached them to SEA Games gold in 2017. He took his expertise to Malawi, trying to grow the game in a country where every bat, every ball, every net session matters.
But Prema wants people to remember more than the scorecards and medals.
She wants them to remember the way he loved – intensely, without half-measures. The way he made friends everywhere. The way he insisted on never punching down, whether in a dressing room or in daily life.
“Hindus, we believe that when your time is up, when your purpose is done in this world, you'll be called back,” she said. “Sometimes I like to believe that, but when I hear these stories, it's very hard to believe because I feel like he has so much more to do.”
Her brother once told their father he wanted a farm when he retired. Instead, his name now lives in tournaments and tributes, in donations to children in Malawi and cultural work in Singapore.
What remains unfinished is the simplest thing of all: an answer.
“Lastly, my hope is that as much as Arjun loved Malawi, I hope some of that love is returned,” Prema said. “For his death to go unanswered in a country he loved so much, I feel is a very sad way to end things.”
For now, the file in Blantyre is still marked “under investigation”.
The question is how long a family, and a game he helped build, must wait before someone finally tells them why a coach who went to uplift a community never came home.
