The Leopard's Call
Reginald N. Shires
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1420828231

An Anglo-Indian Love Story.

The Leopard's Call is an absorbing account of a young husband & wife team as they set out from Deccan in the South of India to live in the wilderness grasslands of West Bengal, in the foothills of the Himalayas, just south of Bhutan. There they built a high school for students from local, rare tribes. From the first page of this eloquent brief on living a simple life & raising a family in a jungle, you are immediately drawn into both a hilarious & moving true story of their unforgettable world.

Reginald Shires, a clergyman, was educated first at Clarence High School in Bangalore, where he was born, & completed his studies in theology & English at Spicer College in Kirkee, near Poona(Pune), where he met Norma D'Sena, from the railway families of D'Sena & Hodges of Ajmer in Rajasthan. She was studying to be a nurse. It took a few years, & some unhappy family tragedies, before the two could marry & were blessed with a daughter & three sons.

India has long fascinated me, its cuisines, its colors, its music, its movies & its legends, however, I've rarely heard about any Christian Indians, so coming upon Reggie Shires, his vocation & his family opened up a bright, new vista.

Unbeknownst to me there's been an entire group of Indians surviving & thriving on that vast subcontinent -- the Anglo-Indians -- those with a Christian British man somewhere back on the family tree who married an Indian woman. Accepted by neither the uninvited British elite nor the native, subjugated Indians, no matter their religious preferences, these Anglo-Indians wove a life for themselves mostly around the remarkable system of railways the British built with Indian labor, & the Christian teaching of orphans.

Reggie Shires is such a man & The Leopard's Call is his story, complete with black & white photos of families, weddings, college groups, safaris & school life where his wife was the nurse while he was a minister. Many years later, Reggie Shires went on to complete his M.A. in journalism at Pennsylvania State U & his M.A. in theology at Michigan's Andrews U. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Times of India & many other magazines & journals. Reggie & Norma Shires now reside near Washington, D.C.

I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir from a different place & a different time(post-WWII onwards). Reggie Shires' voice is charming & often written in the present tense. His affection for his life, his wife, his children, & his calling shine throughout. Of course, who he is & where he came from could have filled a whole other history book, & deserves to -- India maybe one of the most populous countries in the world, & only recently, in the scope of its history, become united as a nation while recovering from 200 years of imperial rule by another country (England), however gurus & “wise men” notwithstanding, among its teeming millions there are a multitude of life stories, & The Leopard's Call is just such a rare treasure

As Narayan would say, a “pucca” read! The only thing missing is a map.

More from Reginald N. Shires: At the Age for Love: A Novel of Bangalore During World War II.
(04/09/06)

Rebecca