“While reading a headline about Kashmir a few years ago,” writes Priyanka Mattoo in her new memoir, “I realised how often my people are discussed in terms of the many things that happened to us.” Mattoo is Kashmiri-American. Though she by no means lived in Kashmir after her household migrated to Britain, then Saudi and in the end the United States since she was a toddler, the creator retains a deep grief over the displacement her household suffered within the Nineties, when, like a thousand others like them, they had been compelled to flee the valley and depart behind a household residence in Srinagar. Her memoir, Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, cobbled collectively from a variety of her journalistic accounts of life in Kashmir and the US, is an try in direction of a story of Kashmiri life that isn’t outlined by tragedy alone. To write, within the creator’s phrases, “about who we are.”
Ensconced inside twin imperialisms, American and Indian, the memoir opens up quite a few prospects for an exploration of Kashmiri personhood within the twenty first century – an intervention right into a rising physique of writing coming from Kashmiri Pandit writers who got here of age across the Nineties. And but, to take action in 2024 additionally requires the author to string with care and nuance the distortions which the tragedy of the Pandits has undergone within the arms of the Hindu proper, who’ve used the incident to mobilise and justify a retributive and infrequently gleefully inhumane politics in direction of Kashmiri Muslims in recent times.
That is just not the e-book Mattoo writes. Incoherent, digressive and overwhelmingly inward in its gaze, her considerations towards the Kashmiri situation seem to increase solely insofar as her household’s previous. Any solidarity in direction of Kashmiris at present below navy occupation is conveniently sidestepped: “So many Kashmiris’ grief and loss outweigh mine by a factor of thousands,” she writes. “Can we ever go back? Should we ever go back? I am neither historically nor politically fluent enough to unpack these answers”.
What stays is a litany of diasporic banalities, costumed in turgid Manish Malhotra magical realism. A passing nod to Hindu organized marriage is made with none reference to caste. Likewise the invocation of faith and ritual, all inflected with useful American analogies (Vaishno Devi is “Capri stripped of its fancy awnings”, the goddess Kali a maternal girlboss). In what looks as if a very American affliction, the tendency of the memoir in direction of individuation robs the e-book of something resembling a broader story of a group; nothing to bridge the nice distance that extends between particular person and societal perception. Blinded by the restrictions of her analysis, Mattoo can solely discuss household, by no means group.
To belong isn’t simply to commemorate or protect, but additionally to chastise, reproach, lament. It is perhaps harsh to say this renders Mattoo an outsider, but the e-book does little to dispel this notion. If something, it throws the chasm between id and belonging into ever better aid.

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones
By Priyanka Mattoo
Penguin Viking
pp. 304; Rs 699