How to live another life

Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones by Priyanka Mattoo

Dear Readers,

My dad used to say learning a new language is a chance to live another life.

Often, I think of this as I stumble in French or tumble around with my extremely limited Italian. I’m not truly fluent in another language.

I console myself by reading. Maybe it doesn’t quite allow me to live another life, but the best books feel like travelling. I learn different ways of being. New possibilities open. And when I return home, I see my home with more clarity.

Priyanka Mattoo’s memoir, Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones, is a transporting book.

In 1989, violent insurgencies in the Kashmir region forced Priyanka’s community to flee. Her family home, the place generations of her ancestors had lived, was gone.

“I don’t have a home,” Priyanka writes.

From there, she fills the loss with her curiosity about love and life. In chapters that span overlapping years, this story moves through some of the 32 places she has lived over the past 40 years.

Through Priyanka’s eyes, I understood what it might be like to be born in Kashmir, experience the trauma of losing a home at young age, move many times alongside a loving family, learn to cook, study for a law degree, work as an agent in Hollywood, make a movie, and realize the dream of becoming a writer.

Reading this book feels like being with your most interesting and generous friend. She invites you in.

Recently, I spoke to Priyanka for Interview Magazine. Our interview will be published next week, but we had a fascinating conversation.

I asked her about speaking Kashmiri and, specifically, a saying from the book:

“I'd remove your thorns with my eyelashes.”

Here’s what she said:

There's so much violence and a fierce love in it. Love is not gentle. Love is, “I would give my life for you. I would give my comfort for you. I would give my bodily autonomy for you.”

Over millennia, there has been so much dispute. We were invaded by gangs of marauders for our entire history and in a million different ways. And I think, for that reason, we’re insular, but we’re so fiercely protective. And our language reflects that.

We don't say, “I love you.” In Kashmiri, we say “I would die for you.”

Anyone can say “I love you,” but it's action that matters. What would you do for me? Would you inconvenience yourself for me? Would you put yourself in danger for me? That's love.

This is exactly what my dad meant, that a language captures ideas that are far bigger than a single word or one person. A language contains history. It holds experiences, a mind set, and becomes a way to pass them on.

A word or a phrase isn’t a substitute for being fluent, but they can offer a window. I came away from this book understanding a new way of seeing the world and the people I love.

Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones is elegant, touching (I cried three times), and funny. It is shot through with this wry, playful humour.

I loved this book, highly recommend it, and think you will too — it will be published on Tuesday.

Yours in reading,

Claire xo

P.S.

• Last year, I published a story written in a minor key about Lego and time travel called Jude the Brave. Last week, it won the silver medal for fiction at the National Magazine Awards, yay!

• For Outside Magazine, I wrote about how my skin cancer diagnosis changed my relationship with the outdoors. I continued the conversation with Matt Galloway on The Current.

• In The Globe & Mail, my piece about medical assistance in dying, [gift article] Voices of MAiD.

• It is a stressful watch, but I highly recommend Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War on Netflix. Using talking heads and footage, much of it felt like a flashback. The Berlin Wall coming down, for example, was an emotional watch, but mostly, it shows the link between World War II and where we find ourselves now.

• Who has listened to a good podcast lately? I have many news programs on the go, but would love to find one about a story or investigation that goes over several episodes. Please let me know.

• Did anyone else do #1000words of summer? I did and it an excellent way to keep writing through the pre-summer chaos.

• This newsletter is about books I love, it’s free & monthly. Thank you for reading!