Priyanka Mattoo interview: ‘Losing someone over Kashmir was more painful, it affects everything’

Over the last four decades, Mattoo has called 32 different places home — though she is quick to clarify that they were, in fact, 32 different postal addresses. Her family’s dream of settling down was shattered in 1989 Exodus from the valley when Mattoo was little. Her family was eagerly awaiting the completion of their home in Kashmir, when the devastating news arrived: their house had been looted and burnt down. Mattoo spent her childhood in London and Saudi Arabia before moving to the United States as a teenager. Though she’s lived here since, she admits her “Americanness has always felt like a costume.”

“I used to devour books,” she confesses. “Hundreds of them a year, on my Kindle, on whatever platform I could find, like an addict.” But now, Mattoo’s relationship with books has evolved. She now prefers to read one book at a time, on paper, purchased from a bookstore. Coming from a lineage of headstrong women, she was nurtured by her no-nonsense nanaji who believed kitchens weren’t women’s domain. Minds, not mops, were their tools. He’d fume at the sight of them cooking. Imagine if every home had a nanaji like hers — what a world that would be! Excerpts from an interview:

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones is not a typical story of exile. It does start like one, but as one leafs through it, it takes on multiple dimensions. Was that intentional?

I did not want to talk about exile. I thought it was overdone. I was also tired of reading about what happened to us Kashmiris, instead of who we are and who we were. I wanted to preserve the joy of that and there was no way to do this without getting into a little bit of personal and political history. We’ve been pawns and secondary characters for so long and I wanted to write something that wasn't just about that.

You point out that while brown pain has found a lot of space in western literature, brown joy remains unexplored. Are you trying to reconcile the two in your book?

Yes, I am. There is a lot of commentary about how much humour there is in the book as though one bad thing happened and I should just carry it around like a weight around my neck for the rest of my life. And I said, oh, what you don’t understand is that there’s no one funnier and more grateful than people who have seen some things like out of pain can come not just a lifetime of weirdness and trauma, but out of pain can come great joy, great appreciation for who we are, a great closeness, and definitely a sense of humour, a storytelling ability.

You express that writing about cultural burdens was something that you initially resisted. What changed?

I think that I was just sick of the headlines. It was like, okay, again, something has happened. There’s always some kind of land grab happening. It’s all about land. Everyone knows this. That’s going to happen forever. Now, can we just reframe the narrative to remind ourselves and other people that we exist outside of the headlines? And so I wrote this piece to bring us all together. Also, I was hopeful that it would resonate with people of all backgrounds; Hindu, Muslim, Pakistani, Indian, whatever. I wanted to share with them my feelings of a place I had loved without being negative, just to say here is how I spent my summers in Kashmir. This is what we lost. The first chapter was originally a piece of an op-ed in the New York Times that I wrote. And it got the response I wanted from people of all backgrounds. And as I wrote more and more things, I realised I was writing a book piece by piece. So, I think I had been resisting that subject. And then once I started writing about it in a way that felt community-building instead of divisive, because a lot of writing about Kashmir is divisive and inflammatory.

Alexandra Schwartz wrote of memoir as an art form in her article in The New Yorker in the context of Annie Ernaux. And she says that the purpose of Ernaux’s writing, she believes, is not merely to record things that have happened, but to “make things exist”. It resonated when I was reading your book, which is particularly interesting because you say Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones is also used to describe something so rare and precious that the listener should question their very existence. Can you also form a connection as to how memory plays out in your book? Were you taking copious notes? Did you journal? Because sometimes you remember the smallest details like a toothache. And then sometimes you forget that your friend Mariam had come over to your place for a sleepover.

I would say, no, I relied entirely on my memory. I was not a journaler. I don’t have any objects. We moved so much; there aren’t many mementos. There’s nothing that would jog a memory. All we have is our collective memories. Me and my family, that’s all we have. Knowing those are fallible, knowing those are influenced by emotion, and the way that we are, the way that we remember them is how we carry them forward. That was really what I wanted the book to be. I’ve always been a big fan of memoir. I also am just so interested in the human condition. And I think what better way to learn about people than to read about them? But memoir is a memory. Memoir is about memory. Memoir is not about facts. There’s a very, very big difference between a historical record or whatever might come in an obituary.

And so I think what I set out to do was to ask, why do some things stay crystal clear in my mind and in my family’s collective consciousness? Why have some things been forgotten? How do those things that we have remembered differently affect our current day-to-day, who we are, how we enter situations? So that stuff has always been really interesting to me.

Since you brought up Miriam, I was particularly moved by the part where you talk about Miriam leaving you because of the political upheaval that was happening back home. It fundamentally changed how you looked at your friendships, how you made friends. Was it trauma? How did that specific event inform how you moved in the world?

It’s interesting because in many ways people are going to look at the book or hear about the book and think that Kashmir was a formative traumatic experience. And I don’t know if it was. You’ve noticed something that I don’t know anyone’s brought up because I think for me losing Kashmir was something awful that happened, but losing someone I loved over Kashmir was somehow even more painful. And I think that affects everything. It affects how I see the world. It affects how I see the Gaza-Israel situation because I can see humanity. I see what happens when people are used as pawns for a land grab. I see what the personal toll is other than the death and destruction happening. I know that pitting communities against each other as is done all the time is a tragedy.

I want to briefly talk about houses. Where we come from, there’s this running joke among my friends that our parents are obsessed with building houses. In Dogri, a painstakingly built house is called a kothi. People erect houses even when they are in debt, even when they are the only ones who stay behind while children go off elsewhere. So many shared dreams in building a house, and you lost one. Have you been able to make new ones?

I think culturally, we are very wired. I’m like an older person in my mind. Because I was the first of my cousins, and the last one to remember Kashmir, my wiring and mindset is very much aligned in some ways with my parents’ generation and their cuts. Because I was there, I was a pretty conscientious, almost 10-12 year old, when all this stuff was going on. Everyone else was a baby. So I was clumped into the grown-up group, pretty quickly. The obsession with building a house, which my parents carried here as well, by the way. They’ve lived in some temporary housing, but it was never permanent. Building a house and losing it did not change their mind that they should build a house. It was always about building; doors are gonna be like this, windows are gonna be like that. The home is the idea of how they grew up. It’s like a capsule for all the values that we have, right? It’s never about the house; it’s like the container for what we hold dear. And it’s so funny because I too grew up — even though we lost a home — with an idea of what a home should feel like. So, yes, of course, I made a home here. Our house is everything.

Are you planning to visit Kashmir ever?

We haven’t made actual plans yet. My whole family left Kashmir, so everyone’s everywhere else. If I can visit my family in Delhi, and Pune, and all that, I have to come in the winter. I don’t want to go to Kashmir in the winter, with the kids. I want to go there in the summer so it’s two separate trips. We’re thinking about this Christmas. But Kashmir would be a summer trip; I think that would be a couple years out.

You say that you don’t hear Kashmiri that often around you, and you have stopped speaking it that often as well. Is that how languages die? What keeps you from putting a conscious effort to preserve it?

I just never really spoke it. Because as we moved into new spaces, I had to learn the language of where we were. When I was three, all of a sudden, I was like, oh, I got to learn English. And when I was six, it was like I got to learn American, a whole other language, and my easiest language became English. And then my brother also had difficulty just understanding Kashmiri, so he and I spoke in English. I can speak Hindi, enough conversationally, but my parents spoke to me in Kashmiri, and I spoke to them in English. That’s just what it was, and maybe it is. I don’t think the language is going to die. There are still Kashmiris speaking Kashmiri. I’m not totally worried about that. I wish they could figure out a more codified way to teach it.

Do you not think that your book can be perceived as political? And especially when you’re writing about a geography which has changed so much. You have recently denied that interpretation.

It was not intended in that way, but my book can be perceived in as many ways as there are readers for it. When I wrote it, I had no intention to make a point. I think that’s where it helped because I would get overwhelmed thinking there’s so much going on, I have to give so much context; I should explain this, I should explain that. I’m not a historian. I’m not a political reporter, that’s not my job. I think I approach it all with empathy. I believe that every human has the right to live in safety and good health. Obviously, we don’t all have that. I’m not happy about that, but I’m not going to sit here and talk about sides. Obviously, I have an affiliation and a love for my own community, but that’s the community I grew up in. Do I also feel that everyone around us has also suffered? I do.