IT IS a far cry from the days of cocktails and smart parties in a blue-chip bungalow. Now home is a one-room HDB rental flat, with a double bed and a small wardrobe with a rolled-up blue sponge mattress perched on top.

There is a tiny bathroom and a sink at the back near the windows. A computer table, a flat-screen Samsung TV set, an exercise bike, a tiny table and a couple of wooden stools jostle for the remaining space.

'It would be nice to have a place where we could get people over for dinner,' says Madam Pathmavali Rengayah, 61, surveying the 300sqft flat.

Her lawyer husband, Mr Glenn Knight, 64, looks at her and cracks a wry smile. He has been living in the York Hill rental flat, which costs barely $150 in rent a month, for nearly three years.

'It's just temporary. We have a house in Batam and I'm looking to buy an HDB flat,' he says.

Life was not always this lean. Back in the late 1980s, Madam Rengayah could throw all the parties she wanted.

Home was an 8,000sqft, antique-filled bungalow in Frankel Estate with a garden and swimming pool.

Mr Knight was the high-flying head honcho of the Criminal Affairs Department (CAD), which specialises in tackling white-collar crime.

Before taking the job in 1984, he was a formidable public prosecutor handling headline-grabbing cases like that of me-

dium Adrian Lim, who - with his wife and mistress - killed two children as human occult sacrifices in his Toa Payoh flat in 1981.

Everything fell apart in 1991 when Mr Knight was nabbed for attempting to cheat a would-be investor out of $3million and using a false invoice to secure a $65,000 government loan.

He was jailed for a day, fined and struck off the rolls of lawyers in 1994. He also lost pensions and benefits amounting to $300,000.

The bungalow and other possessions soon went too.

'Some of our 'friends' and family members also ran like rats fleeing a sinking ship,' says Madam Rengayah.

But not her.

'I stood by him because I believed in him,' says the former teacher of the man she married in 1978, whom she has known since she was a child.

Mr Knight was a good friend of one of her brothers.

'My brothers were all musicians and Glenn - who played bass and lead guitar - would come over often for parties at my home,' says Madam Rengayah, who has five siblings.

She was barely 12 when they first met; he was 16.

'We used to fight like mad. I thought he was arrogant like hell,' she says, and laughs.

They started dating more than a decade later and married in 1978.

'I had all the qualities he didn't have. I was quite pretty, you know,' she quips.

Mr Knight deadpans: 'I suppose she was.'

His wife says being 'child-free' made weathering the legal storm a little easier. Not that they didn't want children. 'It just didn't happen,' she says.

'It was one less thing to worry about. We just had ourselves,' adds Madam Rengayah, who wrote a Peranakan Indian cookbook last year. She also runs a hibiscus tea business on a Batam farm, where the couple have a home.

Both claim the loss of all that they had worked for did not rankle.

'They were just material things; you can't take them to your grave,' says Madam Rengayah, who had to sell her collection of antiques when they lost their home.

Mr Knight agrees. Along with his elder sister, he was raised by his mother, a teacher. She died in 1984. His parents divorced when he was very young.

'You started with nothing, you got somewhere, you lost it. Well, you just have to shrug your shoulders and get on with it,' he says.

Their lowest point came when they were evicted from a small room they rented from a church in Serangoon Road, which they shared with Mr Knight's spinster aunt.

If Madam Rengayah is upset with the friends who deserted them, she tries not to show it.

'We didn't seek them out as friends. They sought us out because they thought it would be nice to be chummy with the head of the CAD,' she says.

'We'd rather be with people who want to be with us in our hour of need, and thankfully, we had those. That's how we coped.'

Being self-sufficient and spiritual, Mr Knight says, also helped. He has been going to a small group meeting at Covenant Community Methodist Church for the past 15 years.

'It's where I got support all my life,' he says.

While she is not bitter, Madam Rengayah says she is indignant that media reports about her husband insist on digging up his past and trotting out phrases like 'fall from grace'.

'Hey, he is a full-fledged lawyer now!'

Indeed he is. In May 2007, he was reinstated to the Bar and was hired as a litigator at Bernard & Rada Law Corporation.

Last December, he joined Colin Ng & Partners, practising civil and commercial litigation, corporate and securities law and criminal law. The firm made him a partner in January.

In quiet, measured tones, he says: 'It took 16 years but I'm back to being a lawyer. At some stage, people will have to forget the past.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times.