After Riya
Understanding my mother’s fear in the aftermath of Riya Rajkumar’s death
by Anonymous
Content Notes: violence against women and girls, femicide
Author’s Note: This post discusses the femicide of Riya Rajkumar, initial community responses, and understanding the fear of brown mothers.
Two weeks ago, an 11-year-old girl was found murdered, and her father was arrested. At the time of writing this piece, no charges had yet been laid and no details of how she died had been released. My heart was broken and my hands were shaking. I am a South Asian woman living in Toronto and my name rhymes with Riya.
Two decades or so ago, that could have been me. Two weeks ago, as the Amber Alert lit up so many of our phones across the Greater Toronto Area, I watched as news articles updated information minute by minute, hour by hour. Worst of all, I saw comments gather under these articles by people who prioritized their comfortable evening activities over the life of a little brown girl as she lay dying. Is this how little, young brown girls matter? Nothing could have shaken me more to my core than witnessing the sheer selfishness of people who chose to call the emergency line (911), with complaints that the Amber Alert had ruined their evening, and had woken their (still alive, still safe) children. Since then, police have taken the time to express their disappointment regarding the public’s response to the Amber Alert. Is this how little brown girls matter, in the eyes of the Canadian public?
Meanwhile, little Riya was with someone who was supposed to protect her and to ensure her safety and who instead has been arrested in connection to her death: her father who, on Valentine’s day, had taken her out to celebrate her birthday.
I cannot imagine the grieving process for Riya’s mother, but after last night, I understood with sudden clarity my own mother’s hyper-protectiveness about me as a child. Growing up, I didn’t have a curfew — the expectation was that I’d be at home after school or after extra-curricular activities like sports or music lessons. Like many South Asian teens, I had to ask explicit permission to hang out with friends outside my routine and my mother always wanted details: Who was I going to be spending time with? What were their phone numbers? What were their parents’ contact information? And sometimes, the answer was simply “No, it’s too late at night.” More often than not, it was “You see them all the time at school, why is it necessary?” As a teenager, I felt this lack of freedom was profoundly unfair: it always felt to me that my white friends could do whatever they wanted.
As an adult, I still feel the lack of freedom was profoundly unfair, but I also understand with the sharp pain of Riya’s death, my mother’s overwhelming fear. I didn’t understand her panicked voice when I was younger: “Anything can happen. You don’t understand.” Her fear leached into my life in other ways. When I left the province to study at McGill University, she was unable to truly emotionally support the decision: I was too far away from her for her to feel comfortable, and her anxiety about me had a devastating impact on my own ability to feel ok about myself. A mother who constantly asks her child “Will you be ok? Will you be ok?” risks instilling in her child the fear of not being ok, and of never being enough. Still, in my house, my parents provided me with such a sense of safety and belonging that I simply had the expectation that the world would be safe for me to navigate with ease. It never occurred to me that my mother’s anxiety was not just about me and my actions, but about the cruelty and relative indifference of the world.
Growing up, I was always daddy’s little girl and I remain close to him; we still share similar tastes in film, books, and humour. Dad is the one I trust most with important life news and changes — a part of me still fears my mother’s anxiety about change and new directions. Dad knew how to say “congratulations” while mother’s hesitancy always clouded her joy: “But well…will you be ok?”
But as I processed the news, I understood to an extent the unimaginable horror that had driven my mother’s anxiety about my life, and so I turned to my mother first. I called her and said “Mom, I understand better why you were so overprotective of me growing up: it’s because the world is such a devastatingly frightening place. And you really cannot trust anyone. And, no one really is likely to care about little brown girls. Maybe you felt like it was just you against everyone that could hurt me.”
I could hear her choke up on the line. “I still worry you know — when you go for days without texting or getting in touch…I just… worry. I’ll never not worry.”
“I’ll try to be better about that,” I promised. I feel my mother was left with an impossible choice when it came to parenting me: How could she encourage me to take necessary risks for learning, growth, and new directions in my life when the risk of violence and harm are so high? How could she simultaneously instill in me the courage to be brave and explore new opportunities when the realistic price of that courage could be so steep? The Canadian Women’s Foundation reports that 50% of Canadian women experience physical or sexual assault in their lifetime, and 46% of high school girls in Ontario report that they have dealt with unwanted sexual comments or gestures. The Wellesley Institute reports that racialized women are more at risk of domestic violence. Women’s Shelters Canada released a report in 2017 underscoring the fact that when racialized women report violence, their cases are taken less seriously, and women in general are four times more likely than men to be victims of intimate partner violence. According to the Evidence Network, nearly a third of high school girls in Ontario experience dating violence. It’s no surprise that, especially when I was younger, my mother simply didn’t want me out of her sight — if the idea of me traveling to another province was bad enough, the idea of me exploring romantic ventures was unspeakably terrifying for her.
Still, the specific horror of Riya’s death was never something my mother had to emotionally grapple with, not even in speculation about my safety because my father was always a comforting presence in my life, and my mother was able to trust me with him. If my mother was that ocean of churning emotions and anxiety, dad was always the stable island that my mother and I could count on for emotional support. It’s only now that I’m older that I realise just how rare and precious my family dynamic really is. When I spoke to my father, he was as bewildered by Riya’s death as I was; it was completely unthinkable to him that any parent of any gender could harm a child. But for many friends of mine in various communities, the normative standard was to have a violent, abusive, and controlling father.
“There’s a problem among men, Dad,” I said. He still gets uncomfortable when I speak this way, because he takes it personally when there’s no need to do so. It’s not about him, as an individual. I wish he could see that it’s not about the relationship between him and me; it’s about the world we are in, and the responsibility we have to our communities. I don’t know how to tell him this, just as he does not know how to comfort me. “Dad, it’s always men killing women. Men killing girls. It hardly ever goes the other way — with girls and women killing men. Don’t you see that? Men need to talk to other men about this — you may think there’s nothing to talk about because you would never ever do this, but Dad, there are so many men who do. Isn’t that a problem? When it happens in our communities, isn’t that a problem we have to address?”
My dad couldn’t handle the conversation, and he hung up the phone, mumbling a goodbye and a soft “Yes, things are awful…I don’t know what to say.” A younger me would have been enraged by his reaction, but now I know it doesn’t come from a place of indifference but of such strong grief that there sometimes are no words.
Yet, helpless silence cannot be the only option for men when confronted by the reality of masculine, patriarchal violence. I still believe these conversations carry weight and importance in my life, so when I brought up Riya’s murder to a man I was recently seeing, I did so with the intention of wanting to know more about how men thought through this violence. “It’s probably some mental health issue,” he said, and I remember feeling slightly deflated.
I responded flatly, tiredly: “Plenty of women are crazy, but we never hear about the high numbers of women killing their husbands and sons. It’s not a mental health issue; it is an issue of masculinity. It’s maybe a question,” I said. And then I asked: “Why do men murder women and girls?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You’re right though, it is a problem among men.”
I sense the tendency among most men to disidentify with the men who commit these acts of violence. “I’m not like them,” they want to tell me. What are you like? I want to ask them. And how are women and girls supposed to know the measure of your respect or predict when it may run out? A while ago, I read an article called “The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture”; in it, author Nora Samaran details the relationship between violence and nurturance, and describes a masculinity that stands in tenderness and strength that seeks to protect and understand the self as well as others’ selves. She writes:
“Violence is nurturance turned backwards.
These things are connected, they must be connected. Violence and nurturance are two sides of the same coin. I struggle to understand this even as I write it.
Compassion for self and compassion for others grow together and are connected; this means that men finding and recuperating the lost parts of themselves will heal everyone. If a lot of men grow up learning not to love their true selves, learning that their own healthy attachment needs (emotional safety, nurturance, connection, love, trust) are weak and wrong — that anyone’s attachment, or emotional safety, needs are weak and wrong — this can lead to two things.
1. They may be less able to experience women as whole people with intelligible needs and feelings (for autonomy, for emotional safety, for attunement, for trust).
2. They may be less able to make sense of their own needs for connection, transmuting them instead into distorted but more socially mirrored forms.”
I think about what led Riya’s father, who died in the hospital after being charged with first-degree murder, to kill his daughter. I think about how, through the act of murder, he did not see her as a person with a full life of her own, but as some corporeal extension of his own complex emotions of pain, loss, hope, or happiness. And then I think about the silence of other brown men in my life. With love in my heart, I want them to find the words.
As I write this article, I acknowledge the fatigue I too feel in trying to have these conversations under a white gaze, and under a system that seeks to criminalize brownness or seeks to apply a race to the problem of toxic masculinity. Brownness isn’t inherently violent, but toxic masculine violence does exist in our communities. Brown women and girls deserve so much better from all the communities we are a part of: we did not deserve to see the vast majority of the Canadian public respond so shamefully with annoyance to the Amber Alert regarding a young brown girl. We did not deserve yet another brown man in our communities who harmed his own daughter. We did not deserve haphazard and superficial commentary by people outside our communities calling this an “honour killing” when they would never apply that term to white fathers who harm their white daughters.
Riya did not deserve this.
Riya deserved better, and so do we all.
We deserve a world where we are safe to discover who we are.
We deserve to have moments of joy with adults we trust with our lives and with our safety.
We deserve to live in a kind and just world.
North York Women’s Shelter — non-judgemental safe shelter, advocacy, programs & services including 24-hour crisis support
Peel Committee Against Woman Abuse — creating an effective community response to abuse in the Region of Peel
Ontario Women’s Justice Network/Metrac — Legal Help
Family Service Toronto — Counseling in Multiple Languages
Assaulted Women’s Helpline — Available 24/7 in over 200 languages
