The Leopard’s Call, an Anglo-Indian love Story
Reginald Shires Author House, $ 17.75, pp 178.

They were the most unlikely pioneers. Reginald Shires from Bangalore was a sports-loving student of theology who became a pastor. Norma D’Sena was a fun-loving girl from a railway family in Ajmer, who loved dancing and singing with her uncle’s band and qualified as a nurse. The met, fell in love and got married.

So far it was a normal Anglo-Indian love story... Then, when he was drawing Rs 120 a month as a pastor, they ‘decided to leave India for England and a better life’ but they couldn’t raise the money. Many other Anglo-Indians, who had set their hearts on leaving India, had to stay back out of sheer necessity: they couldn’t afford to migrate. That, too, is an oft told tale in this community.

At this point, however, they came to a remarkable turning point in their lives. Reginald was offered a job as an English teacher in a farming school in Falakata, West Bengal. Norma would be the school nurse and teach physiology and home science. They accepted.

It was a long journey, with their two children and Norma’s sister, to the forested wilderness where the mountains of Bhutan come down to the grasslands of Bengal. For this city-bred couple that first night in Falakata was an unnerving experience...

“I had heard stories of this place too, about the big cats that still walked the narrow paths of the school at night, lifting cattle from the dairy and carrying away dogs. As the rain poured down on our cottage and we settled down to sleep on the cement floor, things were coming together and I wondered how we’d work at this new spot in our young lives.”

But they did work and they did learn to enjoy their rugged pioneer life: teaching, ploughing, poultry farming, growing their own vegetables, playing hockey with bamboo roots as sticks, cycling to the village market, ministering to the sick, even learning how to use the foot-powered press to produce work in English, Hindi, Oriya, Bengali and Nepali. They also had two more children out on that far, forested, frontier.

No easy life

It was certainly not an easy life but Reginald Shires captures the adventure of it all with gentle good humour that makes light of the discomfort and harshness of living beyond the edge of civilisation. Or perhaps that is true civilisation: the ability of a man and woman, fortified by faith and their love for each other, to handle whatever fortune can throw at them with grace, light-heartedness and fortitude. Theirs is a vindication of the Beetles’ song All You Need is Love.

It is this radiance that shines through The Leopard’s Call making for charming, effortless, reading. Reginald’s simple, but often very lyrical style is refreshingly free of the self-conscious posturing and surrealism that seems to be the hallmark of many current bestsellers.

The tale that he tells however is persuasively gripping in its sincerity and that probably is why he saw no reason to embellish it with stylistic flourishes: There was absolutely no need to gild this lily.

It has however, left us with one small doubt and so we must put a question to the Shires— “With all your courage and tenacity in the face of great odds, did you really have to leave the land of our birth?” But then that is often regarded as a controversial question which is perhaps, best left unanswered.