Dal & Rice, Wendy M. Davis’s collection of reminiscences, is a snapshot of a way of life long vanished. Davis is a daughter of the British Raj. Her father, Sir Godfrey, was a high official and witness to the great changes that came about as a result of India’s struggle for independence. When Mahatma Gandhi was jailed after the first civil disobedience campaign, Sir Godfrey visited him daily. A decade later, he even played London tour guide for the illustrious ex-prisoner.

Born in 1928, Davis grew up with the requisite mix of ayahs, boarding schools, and summer holidays away from the Indian heat. She is in her element when describing pony races at the convent school in Kashmir, or recounting idyllic stories of the household menagerie.

Davis provides an amusing account of life in Karachi during the Second World War, but her experience in India draws to its close around the same time as the war itself. The narrative dwindles at this point, and only picks up again when she describes her mother’s illness and death in the following decade. Davis is silent about her father’s experience with the partition of India and her own reaction to Gandhi’s assassination the following year.     

In her mid-forties, five years after the death of her father, Davis moved to Edmonton. All she has to say of her life in this country is: “Canada uncorked me.” This unwillingness to reflect on much of her later life experience makes Dal & Rice a rather frustrating collection of vignettes – more oral history than memoir. Davis herself is missing from the tale, as if she feels that her own story pales in comparison to that of her father, or to Kiplingesque tales of snakes in the garden. On the matter of her own experience, she is either ambivalent or completely silent. What else can explain why the book is named after what she calls her least favourite Indian meal?