Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones: A Memoir

Priyanka Mattoo was born into a wooden house in the Himalayas, as were most of her ancestors. In 1989, however, mounting violence in the region forced Mattoo´s community to flee. The home into which her family poured their dreams was reduced to a pile of rubble. Mattoo never moved back to her beloved Kashmir-because it no longer existed. She and her family just kept packing and unpacking and moving on. In forty years, Mattoo accumulated thirty-two different addresses, and she chronicles her nomadic existence with wit, wisdom, and an inimitable eye for light within the darkest moments. She takes us from her grandparents´ sprawling home in Srinagar, where her boisterous aunties raced through the halls, to Saudi Arabia, where friendships were gained and lost behind the sandstone walls of a foreigners´ compound. We witness her courtship with a nice Jewish boy, now her husband, and her efforts to rep-licate her mother´s rogan josh recipe via Zoom. And we are with her as she settles into her unlikely new home-land, Los Angeles, where she sets off on what is perhaps her most meaningful journey: that of becoming a writer. Through these astonishingly poignant and often laugh-out loud essays, Mattoo has given us an open-hearted, frank, revealing glimpse into a journey of almost constant motion, as well as a journey of self-discovery.