Kully Janagle
My sister’s life mattered, and will always matter and be so precious to me and my family.
Her death was barely reported on, and despite some very good professional support in the days that followed, my family were pretty much left to our own devices to navigate and understand a judicial process and everything that came with that.
Shorty-Penji (which I called her, meaning “little sister” in Punjabi) was so full of life and joy and was always laughing and singing and making jokes; she’s 16 months older than me but we were like twins, so loud and immature and silly together, singing and dancing and always laughing.
She became a completely different person when she was in her marriage, and was withdrawn, extremely depressed and attempted suicide. She was broken, and we only found out after she’d left him that she was experiencing domestic abuse; sadly, but not surprisingly unfortunately, she kept it hidden.
But she got her life back together: she started divorce proceedings, she enrolled at college and started self-improvement work, and she regained that spark and energy and laugh that she had.
He started stalking and harassing her, he started showing up to her workplace and abusing her. She went to the police several times, and she got an injunction out against him. She reported him again to the police just a few days before she was killed.
It’s so horribly, painfully true: a woman is most vulnerable when she regains her power and control over her life, and that’s when all the systems that should have been in place to support my sister failed her. I’ll always question why the police didn’t do more, why there wasn’t more support for her and for all the other women who are system-failed, and why the media didn’t report it more. And I’m not afraid to question if racism, misogyny, patriarchy, and a complete lack of compassion and understanding of culture and pressure and domestic abuse played a part; I think it all did.
Our communities and families also need to be held to account in terms of the pressure, burdens and expectations we place on our women, the way our culture and thinking traps women and sees them as “less than” and the way they devalue a woman’s life.
As a man, I’ve stood up and fought against that all my life for Shorty-Penji, my other sister Buddy-Penji (“big sister”) and my mom. I’ve seen first-hand how our men have controlled their lives and choices, how they have bullied and pressured them and taken away their voice, and how they’ve held our women to impossible standards and then punished them for not meeting them.
And the same is true of our “systems” in society, from the police to the justice system to the media to the government. We are not doing enough to protect our women and girls, we are not valuing their lives, we aren’t seeing them for who they truly are and what they truly want.
But as families we will always see them, we will always love them and miss them and in our own ways, we will always fight for them.