An Exclusive Excerpt From Priyanka Mattoo’s Spirited Memoir ‘Bird Milk And Mosquitoes Bones’

I’ll Show You

[1928-2019]

“You’re so nice,” Nani’s older sister often told her. “But your children, well . . .” She’d disagree, half hearted and loyal, but her sister wasn’t wrong. Nani was the sweetest person I have ever known. I used to joke that she was the only nice person in our entire family. If you met the Kaul girls, you’d understand. They’re all brilliant and hilarious. But nice? Even the word is confusing. In a culture and family that value presence in our women, “nice” can imply a toothlessness, or gullibility. It is the limpest noodle of compliments, and it’s still impossible to call someone nice in front of my mother without her reflexive addendum: “poor thing.” In cataloguing Kashmiri compliments for women, I grew up hoping to be tez (sharp), thrat hish (like a thunderclap), zahar hish (like poison), toofan hish (like a storm), an overall patakuh (firecracker). Even my great-grandmother valued a woman’s “indy-pindy” above all. Nary a mention of nice, gentle, or kind. Those traits were not necessary for survival.

Our tumultuous history selected for tough cookies, and the Kashmiri feminine ideal was codified in the fourteenth century by our renowned poet Lal Ded. She was a mystic prone to running off on her own, and it doesn’t take a deep read to figure out what kind of lady she was. In my favorite vakh, 127, she says:

I can scatter the battalions of southern clouds,
Dry the ocean, play physician
to the most lingering fever and cure it.
But I can’t knock sense into a fool.

As the French have Marianne, their symbol of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Kashmiris have our beloved Lalla, patroness of self-sufficiency, skepticism, and a powerful side-eye.

The irony, then, of my Nani Lalita, or “Lalla Bahen” to her friends and family, sharing a name with her polar opposite! Unlike her namesake, Nani floated around Srinagar like Amelia Bedelia in a sari. One time, she went for a walk, stopped at a friend’s, and absentmindedly came back wearing one of the wrong shoes. Only one, but with a heel, and the other one was flat. “Oh, Nani!” we said, even as children. We worried about her. Not sharp, not poisonous, she was more gentle mist than thunderclap. This time it was a shoe, we murmured. What would it be next time? Her wallet? Her jewelry? I was glad she had us, her wary phalanx. Silly, sweet Nani, the softest, whitest sheep, bobbing solitary in our sea of darkness.

Nani’s agreeable nature was especially unexpected after the life she had lived. Through the tragic deaths of siblings, a perfunctory marriage, the eventual devolution of her home- land, Nani still laughed like a child: her helpless peal so loud and clear she’d have to lean to one side and wipe her eyes, her whole body shaking, whether it was the first time she heard a joke or the hundredth. Though she was quieter than her rowdy brood of children, her voice cut through their noise, a warble powered by surprise and delight. So much about the world surprised and delighted Nani, not least her own name. “Lalita?” people remarked her whole life. “That’s such a beautiful name.” She’d light up like it was the first time she’d ever heard that and agree.

Nani, unlike her daughters, did a lot of “ladies’ work,” partly in keeping with generational gender roles, but also because marrying and rearing children in her early twenties didn’t leave much time for higher education. She devoted herself to the domestic sphere, and some of her pursuits were more successful than others. I think it’s okay to share now that she was a dreadful cook, who never met a foodstuff she didn’t boil to an unseasoned mush. I caught a rare glimpse of disgust on her sweet face once, and it was directed at a plate of salad. “Those vegetables are just looking at me,” she said, and shuddered. Even when I was well into my thirties, she would groan with despair if she heard I’d skipped a meal. When I visited her from college, she microwaved my orange juice for ten seconds so I wouldn’t catch a cold. Oh, Nani. She’d startle my uncle, mid-nap on the couch, to insist he’d be more comfortable in bed. And everything made Nani cry — from watching TV commercials to hearing thirdhand about a stranger’s recent illness. Her heart was as soft as her tear-filled eyes.

However, Nani shone with a needle. She loved to crochet, and spent the months of my mother’s first pregnancy whipping up billowy matching baby sets for me. During my first year, when Mum was dropping me off at Matamaal to finish her thesis, Nani memorialized each handmade outfit with a run to the photo studio down the street. After we left India, and Mum was away from her mother for the first time, she taught herself the crafts she had been denied in her student days, and I grew up surrounded by her handiwork: whimsical sweaters, crocheted hats, and, for a notable period in the 1980s, mac- ramé plant hangers. It was part need—as recent immigrants, why would we buy something we could make?—but also a connection to Nani, and meditative, too. Mum knit sweater after sweater to combat the British damp, while I read next to her, with a bowl of custard, under the one window in our London apartment that let in enough sun.

The summer when I was five, Mum took me to our library in London to pick out books for our summer trip to Kashmir. I lugged over a pile of books, and she plucked out the one on teaching yourself to crochet. It wasn’t like her to tell me I wasn’t ready to learn something—I wonder now if this related to her father’s edict about ladies’ work—but she says I was too small to mess with needles on my own. Somehow, I managed to check it out anyway and keep it hidden.

Mum dropped me off at Matamaal in that summer of 1985 with no crochet hooks but that book tucked away in my back- pack. Nani was soft, and I already knew it. By the time Mum was back a week later, I wandered in nonchalantly, holding my favorite doll, who usually wore a green gingham A-line dress but was now drowning in an outfit I had made her, with materials from Nani. My intention had been to crochet a pair of overalls, but after mastering the simple stitches needed for straps and pinafore, I became drunk with ambition. I ended the whole thing in kind of a tiered meringue-looking skirt, all lemon yellow. My mother looked at me holding that poor doll—plumber on top, flamenco on the bottom — sighed, and bought me my own hook.

Lalla the poet would have been proud. She beat a constant drum for autodidacts, as in vakh 13:

Love-mad, I, Lalla, started out, spent days and nights
on the trail.
Circling back, I found the teacher in my old house.
What brilliant luck, I said, and hugged him.

On being self-taught, and only on this point, she and Nani agreed. But why did I love crochet? Who knows. It’s only two motions, looping yarn around a hook, pulling it through another loop. I liked the simplicity of the materials, just a ball of yarn and one needle. As a small child, I liked the sureness of the hook, wary of knitting’s slippery pokiness. Eventually, I taught myself how to knit, and sew, and macramé, and felt, and découpage, and who knows what else, but I always came back to crochet. The possibilities of crochet are endless. A blanket? A hat? A jacket? Try knitting a tablecloth and see how far you get.

Also, the repetitive, small motions calmed me. I noticed early that the world was sometimes too much. Mum says she’d “never known a toddler to need so much space.” Loud noises, multiple people talking at the same time, long social interactions wore me out. And today, still, when my brain feels curdled, after I’ve spent too much time with the memes, and the news, and the agitation of people shouting at one another on the internet, I feel in freefall, and I reach for the needle. I don’t know any better reset than that endless loop and pull. As I sit here, currently working on a rainbow blanket that will never end, because I’ve sized it impossibly large, it connects the invisible dots. I’m under a warm window in London with my mother, beneath an open shutter with my Nani, in Kashmir. Peace and quiet, yes. But it also reminds me of loving, and being loved.

Images courtesy of Kaul & Mattoo Family Archives

Excerpted with permission from Penguin Random House India. The book was released on July 15 in India.