A Brief But Spectacular take on dreaming of home

Priyanka Mattoo is an L.A.-based writer and filmmaker whose new memoir, “Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones,” chronicles her peripatetic search for home, from Kashmir to England to Saudi Arabia to Michigan to Rome and, finally, to Los Angeles. She gives her Brief But Spectacular take on dreaming of home.

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Amna Nawaz: Priyanka Mattoo is an L.A.-based writer and filmmaker whose new memoir, “Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones,” chronicles her peripatetic search for home, from Kashmir to England to Saudi Arabia to Michigan to Rome and finally to Los Angeles.

Tonight, she gives her Brief But Spectacular take on what home means to her today.

Priyanka Mattoo, Author, “Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones”: My parents met at, it’s kind of like a Hindu bar mitzvah. It’s called a makal (ph). They claim it was arranged. It was not arranged.

Listen, my parents have been together for 40-some years. They’re an incredible partnership. And my father has this hilarious practical approach, which is, he believes that all marriages should be agreed to in eight-year options. And every eight years you go, hey, do we still want to be married? And you go, yes or no?

I mean, it’s not the worst idea.

My book is called “Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones.” I was born in
Srinagar, Kashmir, at the foothills of the Himalayas. I lived there on and off until I was 2.5 and then spent a big part of the year there until I was 9. Because of mounting violence in the region, we had to leave and we couldn’t go back.

I moved to London. We moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. We lived in suburban New York. We lived in Michigan. My maternal grandfather, Nanaji, definitely created an army of strong, sort of pathologically assertive women. And so that’s all I knew was to go out in the world with this very confident, noisy attitude.

He was always chain-smoking. He waxed and twirled his mustache and he was so larger than life. Nanaji inspired me to be my true self. There’s a section in the book about this. And what Nanaji really taught the girls, what was baked into them forever was to like themselves, that what anyone else thought or valued was irrelevant.

“No one can take your mind away from you,’ he said sternly to his daughters and nieces and eventually to me. The woman of my family took that edict and ran with it. Food and language are everything to us. I mean, you have to understand we were like tucked away in cold wooden houses during the winter, so all we do is talk and eat.

You will not get recipes written down from Kashmiri women. It’s a lot of like add enough so that it’s red. Rogan josh is the signature Kashmiri meal. It is a delicious, spicy lamb stew. I have a theory about why Kashmiri mothers and grandmothers do not share their recipes. I believe that my mother enjoys feeding me with rogan josh so that when I have to make it I have to call her.

So it’s a loving act, even though it’s a little withholding. I moved to the U.S. in the middle of my freshman year of high school, which was only hard for me. My parents loved it immediately. It’s really hard for me to go through any second of any day without thinking about how lucky I have it and how I could be dead or in a refugee camp if I had just been born 200 feet to the right.

I did think writing books was for other people, and there was no point in which I thought it was a vocation for me at all. I just know that I got to a certain point in my life where I couldn’t hold the words in anymore and they came pouring out.

My name is Priyanka Mattoo, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on dreaming of home.

Amna Nawaz: And you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.