India, June 14 -- Dalloway Day, an annual event, was celebrated on June 11, marking the 100th anniversary, this year, of Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway. But as everyone holds forth about the centenary (the book was published on May 14, 1925, though Dalloway Day celebrations are held in mid-June, when the central event of the novel, Mrs Dalloway's party, takes place), few question Woolf's colonial gaze. Indeed, the Eurasian character left in the margins has rarely been addressed. Far away from the colonial metropole, Daisy, Peter Walsh's Anglo-Indian lover awaits news from him in India. When Woolf mentions her in passing, it is with an air of racial superiority even as her protagonist, Clarissa, suffers from low self-esteem. "Oh if she [Mrs. Dalloway] could have had her life over again!... She [Mrs Dalloway] had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them. this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway." The passage establishes Woolf's protagonist as someone without an inherent sense of self. In her 50s, no longer pressed by the duties of wife and mother, Clarissa Dalloway finds herself wanting to be more than the wife of a conservative MP preparing to throw a party on a fine evening in 1923. As she walks across London, she has opinions on everyone, but it's not the same as participating in luncheons hosted by Mrs Bruton where they discuss politics. From Hugh Whitbread and Peter Walsh to Sally Seton and Miss Killman, everyone is scrutinised, even Septimus Smith's wife, Lucrezia, "a little woman, with large eyes in sallow pointed face; an Italian girl." Everyone, but not 53-year-old Peter Walsh's 24-year-old Anglo-Indian lover, Daisy, wife of a major, mother of two in India. She describes Indian women at large as "silly, pretty, flimsy, nincompoops." The stream-of-consciousness narrative makes the reader wonder: Was Daisy merely a tool to explore the complex relationship that Peter and Clarissa shared in their youth? For Peter looks at Daisy as someone who would boost his ego ("of course, she would give him everything. he wanted!") which Clarissa had bruised. He describes, in his insecurity, the women he loved over the years as "vulgar, trivial, commonplace", and has thought before that: "Daisy would look ordinary beside Clarissa." Clarissa's presence in his life is further underlined by the impactful lines at the end of the text: "It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was." The contemporary reader is bound to ask: With Clarissa's enduring presence, what was Daisy doing in Peter's life? When Woolf dug her characters from within, showcasing their perceptions of each other, why was Daisy left voiceless? A century later, enter Michelle Cahill with Daisy & Woolf. An Australian of Anglo-Indian heritage, the author provides a glimpse of Daisy's life along with the difficulties that come with it, by introducing a mixed-race immigrant protagonist, Mina, who is writing Daisy's story. Woolf is evoked in the novel's epigraph, with a quote from A Room of One's Own: "A woman writing thinks back through her mothers." While the book revolves around motherhood a fair bit, the epigraph works like a double-edged sword: it showcases gratitude for the feminist writers who have paved the way for the telling of Daisy's story while challenging their silence, which has rendered voiceless this character at the margins. In this metafiction set in 2017, Cahill presents the dilemmas of race and migration through Mina's reimagination, in the novel that she is writing, of Daisy journeying to London to meet Peter Walsh. Mina writes, "Muslims and refugees were being restricted by Trump's immigration ban; Theresa May was advocating an early Brexit deal, with Scotland calling for talks on a second referendum. All over the world people of colour felt vulnerable while crossing borders." As the storyteller of Daisy's life, she narrates harrowing experiences of being Anglo-Indians from East Africa and of her brother's mental illness, a result of being bullied at school for being brown-skinned. It's as if Mina, and Cahill herself, is attempting to fill an intersectional gap in the canon. Mina writes, "Mrs Woolf had kept Daisy stunted, and on purpose it seems. Her intent was always to centre Clarissa Dalloway, setting her in flight. Drifting and timeless, she is a hallmark achievement: Clarissa, the stream of Virginia Woolf's consciousness." Cahill's Daisy has the decisive power to leave her husband and son behind to board a ship for London with her daughter and Radhika, a servant from Bihar. She reflects on her experiences as an Anglo-Indian in India by chronicling her life story. Through the course of a journey lasting months from Calcutta to London, she comes face-to-face with the plague and loses her child to death, which changes her romantic obsession into something much stronger: a determination to chart out her life irrespective of Peter Walsh. She engages with the suffragettes, befriends Lucrezia - the other peripheral character in Mrs Dalloway - and makes a living in Italy, which can be interpreted as tragic for the former wife of an officer in the Indian army or as empowering for an immigrant woman in an alien land. Throughout the novel, Cahill keeps fictional characters and real-life figures in conversation with each other. Daisy & Woolf is meta not only for its story-within-a-story structure but also for the many references to Woolf's diaries and letters to interpret her psychology at the time. Daisy is also travelling to London at a time when Woolf is writing Mrs Dalloway. Characters from Woolf's story and suffragette figures such as Sylvia Pankhurst are masterfully incorporated into Daisy's narrative. All of it creates a dialogue between the worlds of Mina, Virginia and Daisy, while exploring grief, death, motherhood, alienation, sexuality and mental illness. The prose of both these novels is distinctive. But while Mrs Dalloway glides, Daisy & Woolf startles by intentionally hitting the brakes on multiple occasions. In the end, this novel that breathes life into an incidental character encourages the reader to examine the colonial gaze of a celebrated 20th-century high Modernist, while underlining that race, identity and migration are as fraught today as they ever were....