Published by Little Toller, 2021, 154 pages

“Shalimar is the bridge between my father’s world and my perception of it, not a real place but one of our own making, filled with his things, his stories, but also mine and my stories which are free for me to pass on as I go on without him.”

Davina Quinlivan was born and grew up in the UK, but her ancestry is Euro-Asian: Burmese, Indian, Irish, French, German and Scottish. In Shalimar, Quinlivan overlays her own experience—moving homes in the UK, marrying, raising children—with the story of her family. The result is a lyrical mix of memoir, nature and travel writing.

Quinlivan’s father is central to the book. He was born in what was then Burma; his father was Irish and his mother was half-German and half-Shan, an ethnic minority living on the borders of Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and China. Quinlivan’s father spent part of his childhood under house arrest during World War II, something that affected him for the rest of his life. As Quinlivan writes, “The trauma of his internment crept into daily life, it was always there, like an ivy twisting its way through an evergreen hedge.” It resulted in an unacknowledged agoraphobia. 

Quinlivan also has Shan ancestry on her mother’s side. Shan women have been historically enslaved, and in the recent past, were trafficked out of Myanmar. She writes about the Shan women in her family, who “married European Colonials and disappeared into the invisible pages of a history book I cannot open”. As she gets older, she starts to listen to the ghosts of her Shan ancestors and sees traces of them in her children’s features.

Quinlivan also migrates, although within the UK. She leaves Hillingdon, an industrial county where she has spent most of her life, to move to rural England: Surrey, Berkshire, Hampshire and Devon. One of the places she lives in is Peaslake, known in 1912 as a meeting place for suffragettes. 

She writes beautifully about nature, the oaks and birches surrounding her, the “cathedral of trees” where she finds peace and a way to deal with the grief of her father’s illness and his death. The woods seem to hold something other-worldly, an old kind of magic. 

She interweaves these accounts with stories about her family: her father stealing forbidden mangoes in the Buddhist monastery in Burma where he was sent as a child; her German-Shan grandmother kissing the Blarney Stone; and, in England, her mother, aunts and grandmother sitting around a table speaking in a mix of Punjabi, English and Burmese. She remembers the food that her aunt, her father’s sister, would cook for them in her home in Ealing, the home that was an echo of the one she had in Shalimar, India.  

I loved the way Quinlivan moves fluidly between the two worlds, and pulls them into a single, rich narrative. This is a story about memory and loss, about leaving and finding home.

Watch my interview with Davina Quinlivan.

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.