From Kashmir to Hollywood, Priyanka Mattoo looks back in new memoir

Priyanka Mattoo is a classic American success story. 

After getting a law degree, she moved to Los Angeles, worked her way up from the mailroom to success as a Hollywood agent before moving on to producing, writing and podcasting.

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But her memoir, “Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones,” illuminates the way the traumas of her past shaped her journey and still linger within. She bounced around the globe as a child, especially after 1989 when she lost her family home and homeland in Kashmir when Islamists began an ethnic cleansing there; soon after her great-aunt was murdered.

“Writing the book was so therapeutic,” says Mattoo, who also writes in the book about her struggles with depression.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q: How did the war in Kashmir and the murder of your great-aunt shape you?

The feeling that anything could be taken away from me at any time was always so strong. It’s still something that I actively have to fight. There was a sense of doom hanging over me. I know this sounds crazy, but I was convinced that if I made it to 21 it would be a successful life. The echoes of that are still there. But I practice transcendental meditation and that has really helped to be in the moment and just live day by day and try and enjoy it instead of constantly fearing the 900 scary things that could happen. 

Q: Before the violence in Kashmir, you already spent more time living in England and Saudi Arabia than in your homeland. Did that give your sense of loss a different feeling, perhaps mythologizing Kashmir in your mind?

We spent a lot of time ping-ponging back and forth, going to Kashmir every summer and almost every holiday. In England and Saudia Arabia, where we were was temporary. We never referred to it as home. The idea was always to move back home. We were building the house to go back to and saving money for this hospital my father wanted to build. That’s the future that got snatched away.

The feeling for my parents’ generation was very much that nobody leaves or if they do, they come back. It was paradise. 

Still, we had to leave and I think we were all really grateful with how our lives turned out. My mother wondered if, having seen the rest of the world, she could even have gone back to that life. I’ve gotten to live a huge life — I was born in a wooden house in Kashmir and I’ve been to the Oscars. It’s insanity.

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Q: Tell me about the culture of Kashmir.

We’re extremely isolated. So we’ve developed a culture and a language that is completely different from that of India. And we’re extremely insular and slow to take on outside influence. I talk in the book about taking a horse-drawn carriage across town — in the 1980s. We used baskets of coal to stay warm. I have a friend in Kashmir whose family just got central heating last summer – the Himalayas is very cold, but the coals worked until 2023 for this family. So we don’t like change. We’re hard as rocks, an isolated bunch of mountain weirdos

But it’s so beautiful so it’s an amazing vacation destination – the Beatles came through and every other amazing musician. It’s stunningly beautiful with eccentric and striking people. But we don’t have written language and now we are scattered across the globe so we have this incredible devotion to celebrating and preserving the culture. Our language, is hysterical, it’s incredibly colorful and violent. There’s not a normal way to say anything. There are no gentle phrases.

Q: You write about your “immigrant soul.” Did that fade over time in America?

I don’t think that ever goes away. I am a foreigner. I am a citizen, absolutely, but I don’t feel what most Americans feel. I have been embraced by this country in a way that I am incredibly grateful for. I have gotten everything my parents came here to get but I will always have been formed somewhere else. It’s overlay that I really appreciate. 

Q: Do you wish your kids felt that or are you glad that they have the stability growing up that you lacked?

I don’t wish them the sort of restlessness that I feel – it keeps me moving, it keeps me striving, it keeps me traveling but it can feel destabilizing. I often feel trapped. 

And I love their relationship to California. My son, who’s 10, will get out of the car wherever we are and say, “The ocean is that way.” It makes me really happy and it’s why I’ll stay here, even though I’m always itching to go here or there, move here or there. 

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Q: How did Los Angeles shape you?

I believe you can come out here with a crazy idea to make it work. Everyone here is very strange. And there’s a comfort in that. You can seek out your own specific kind of weird.

Coming to Los Angeles in your twenties is like looking into an empty warehouse painted white and being told to fill it with whatever you can. It’s terrifying. I didn’t know who I was and I was so confused. And then slowly you start to paint a wall and do a mural and buy a piece of furniture. And before you know it, you have a whole life here. I was able to build a life here from a totally bare foundation. Los Angeles forces you to think about who you are because there isn’t the same stimuli you have in New York – if I’d gone there in my twenties, I could have just floated through, having the best time, but nothing sitting and thinking about why I was sad and angry. Los Angeles forced me to slow down and figure myself out. I rail against it sometimes but I needed it. 

And Los Angeles forced me to enjoy being outside. At first, I thought, “Why am I hiking?” But now I think, “I’m surrounded by sunshine and trudging up inclines and it’s good for the chemistry in my body and I feel pretty good.”