“When I read a headline about Kashmir a few years ago,” writes Priyanka Mattoo in her new memoir, “I realized how often my people are spoken about in terms of the many things that have happened to us.” Mattoo is a Kashmiri-American. Although she has never lived in Kashmir, her family having migrated to Britain, then Saudi Arabia, and finally the United States since she was a child, the author is deeply saddened by the displacement her family suffered in the 1990s, when they, like thousands of others, were forced to leave the valley and their family home in Srinagar. Her memoir, Bird’s milk and mosquito bonescobbled together from a series of her journalistic reports on life in Kashmir and the USA, is an attempt to tell the story of life in Kashmir that is not only defined by tragedy. In the author’s words, “about WHO this is us.”
Set within twin imperialisms, American and Indian, the memoir opens up numerous possibilities for a 21st-century exploration of Kashmiri personality—an intervention in a growing corpus of writings by Kashmiri Pandit writers who came of age in the 1990s. And yet, in 2024, this also requires the author to carefully and nuancedly examine the distortions that the Pandits’ tragedy has undergone at the hands of the Hindu right, which has used the incident in recent years to mobilize and justify retributive and often gleefully inhumane policies toward Kashmiri Muslims.
This is not the book Mattoo is writing. Her concerns about the situation in Kashmir seem to relate only to her family’s past, as they are incoherent, rambling and mostly inward-looking. Any solidarity with Kashmiris currently under military occupation is conveniently sidestepped: “The grief and loss of so many Kashmiris outweighs mine a thousandfold,” she writes. “Can we ever go back? Should we ever go back? I am neither historically nor politically versed enough to find those answers.”
What remains is a litany of diasporic banalities cloaked in the turgid magical realism of Manish Malhotra. A fleeting allusion to arranged Hindu marriages occurs without reference to caste. So does the invocation of religion and ritual, all underscored by helpful American analogies (Vaishno Devi is “Capri without its fancy awnings,” the goddess Kali a maternal girl boss). In a typically American plague, the memoir’s tendency toward individuation robs the book of anything resembling a broader history of a community; nothing to bridge the great distance between individual and social understanding. Blinded by the limits of her research, Mattoo can only talk about family, never community.
Belonging is not just about remembering or preserving, but also about chastising, reprimanding and lamenting. It may sound harsh to say that this makes Mattoo an outsider, but the book does little to dispel this notion. If anything, it highlights the gap between identity and belonging even more clearly.
Bird’s milk and mosquito bones
By Priyanka Mattoo
Penguin Viking
P. 304; 699 Rupees
