Like most Kashmiris, Priyanka Mattoo’s most memorable recollections of childhood are from the years she spent at her matamaal (literally, “maternal grandmother’s home”). The matamaal was a large, multi-storey structure in the suburban neighbourhood of Karan Nagar—a typical Kashmiri home with cantilevered balconies jutting out from the sides, and undulating eaves adorning the roofs.
Mattoo remembers that the home possessed quite a feminist streak. “The Kaul girls,” she writes of her aunts, “doctors, engineers, professors, and some now grandmothers—have no patience for wallflowers and fools. They enter every unfamiliar room as though they own it.” She recalls how she would clamber up the conservatory on the third floor and sit there reading Pippi Longstocking while her mother busied herself with her PhD. This was how she began to develop a passion for literature.
Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones: A Memoir
Penguin Random House
Pages: 304
Price: Rs.699
For this, Mattoo credits her disciplinarian grandfather who did not want the women in his family to obsess over household chores, and instead encouraged them to pursue vocations that “involve the mind”—a dictum that she followed with enthusiasm. Narrated with flair in her memoir Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, this Kashmiri Pandit’s journey from Srinagar to Hollywood is remarkable for its depth and lyricism.
‘Our definitive severance’
In 1989, however, Kashmir changed forever. Armed insurgency swept through the Valley, and many Kashmiri Pandits became victims of the targeted persecution. Mattoo was already abroad in Riyadh when it happened. They had hoped to return home when things normalised. But that was never to be.
The family got the news about their house being plundered and then going up in flames until it resembled an “empty stack of bricks, with a roof over it—like the world’s most expensive LEGO set”.
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Any updates they received from Kashmir at that time turned out to be tragic stories about one relative after another abandoning their homes in distress, fleeing the Valley, and lodging in crummy refugee camps in the hot plains of Jammu. As for the matamaal, it was not with the family any more. Its new owners had remade the building into a tech sales centre.
“I usually rattle off these facts simply and without an emotion, as a child would, so I don’t cry,” Mattoo writes, adding: “our definitive severance came about slowly and strangely.”
Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones by Priyanka Mattoo. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
After their departure from Kashmir, Mattoo’s family lead an itinerant life, landing in one country after another. The narrative captures the drastic changes she experienced over years of travelling, and the arc of her own story as a woman who no longer had a home to return to, but who grew as determined as ever to carve out a better life for herself. She writes, carefully choosing the right Kashmiri words although she cannot speak the language fluently: “I grew up hoping to be tez (sharp), thrat hish (like a thunderclap), zahar hish (like poison), toofan hish (like a storm).”
All of this unfolds in the backdrop of an intense longing for home, family, customs, language, and tradition—all of which she tries tenaciously to preserve in the face of an expatriate life; the constant obligation to assimilate; to harmonise life between two contrasting dynamics, one chipping away at the other. In particular, she recalls a tense episode when her Jewish husband asks her, during the courtship years, whether their “kids can have bar mitzvahs (initiation ceremonies) if their moms aren’t Jewish”.
As the narration jumps from one country to another, Kashmir remains the constant in the background. When Mattoo grows up in Riyadh during the grim days of the Gulf War, the midnight air-raid sirens and the fear they evoke are chillingly reminiscent of home. Years later, when she interviews the Pakistani singer Ali Sethi as a filmmaker, what stands out for her are his Gilgiti origins. It is interesting how nostalgia can foster a kindred spirit with people who happen to originate from places that barely scrape Kashmir at the edges.
Priyanka Mattoo. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Bird Milk is also special because of its sensitivity and the caution it exercises while dealing with the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. It is a contentious topic in India, and as films like The Kashmir Files penetrate the political imaginary of a large cross-section of Indians, it has supercharged the debate across the political spectrum.
Mattoo, however, appears to be scrupulously aware of how her own story of displacement and exile should be known. As she writes right at the outset: “So many people suffered much more than we did. So many Kashmiris’ grief and loss outweigh mine by a factor of thousands.”
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This solemnity of thought is reflected elsewhere in the book as well. When kar sevaks broke into the Babri Masjid and laid waste to the 400-year-old mosque, it triggered an immediate backlash in Arab cities like Riyadh. And on the receiving end were Indian immigrants like Mattoo.
She recalls how overnight, her Muslim colleagues grew estranged from her. They included Mariyam, whom Mattoo had developed a special bond with on account of her being a Kashmiri. “I couldn’t be mad at her , because she looked sad about it,” she writes. “Still, I didn’t understand. I knew we had some trouble back at home, but what did I have to do with it?”
A narrative of reconciliation
The high point of Bird Milk certainly is one of the concluding scenes where Mattoo enters a library in London, discovers books on Kashmir authored by the 19th century European explorers, and learns the morbid ways in which Kashmiri people had been stereotyped in the past. If Ernest Neve’s Beyond the Pir Panjal essentialises Kashmiris as “deceitful”, “given to larceny”, “strung and neurotic”, C.G. Bruce’s Peeps at Many Lands labels them as “very lazy and very dirty”.
An artisan at a wood carving factory in Srinagar on December 8, 2010. | Photo Credit: NISSAR AHMAD
This experience in some ways represents the acme of her political education, for unlike the bulk of work written in Kashmir over the last 200 years, she is not one to reinforce the Pandit-Muslim binaries in her narrative.
“We’ve been churning out hand-embroidered shawls for centuries, painstaking woodwork screens, glassy smooth papier-mâché jewellery boxes with filigreed enamel,” she writes. “They marvel at what locals have on offer, but, unlike the treatment of Western art of the time, there’s no discussion of the depth behind the humans who make it.”
Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones is a terrific coming-of-age story set in the backdrop of the three-decade-old war in Kashmir. Its themes of love, loss, and longing are articulated with verve, making it an important addition to the literature of exile and displacement in India.
Shakir Mir is a freelance journalist and book critic based in Srinagar.
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