"Curry, Corduroy and the Call," by Gwendolyn Hiebert Schroth

I have written here (7/28/11 and 9/18/11) about three of the “missionary kid” memoirs I have read, both for their connection to my own “missionary kid” background and for my research; I have just finished reading one such memoir that is probably the closest to my own experience of any I have read, although still of course with important differences. “Curry, Corduroy and the Call” (Outskirts Press, 2011) was written by Gwendolyn Hiebert Schroth, who is the older sister of L., one of my friends and roommates at Kodaikanal (Kodai) School in South India. The author’s family lived nearby where my family lived our second term in India, and she and her sisters attended the same boarding school as my brothers and I did. Although the author was there a bit earlier than I was, many of the names (e.g., of teachers and of places), events, and experiences in her book are very familiar to me. These include descriptions of ayahs, bazaars, the Telegu language, the system of getting water and bathing, snakes and scorpions, parcels from churches back in the U.S., parents’ visits to Kodaikanal for their vacations and their children’s consequent temporary moving out of boarding school, the tiffins in which lunch was then brought to the children at noon for eating on the lawn, driving overloaded cars through streams, the “compounds” we lived on, sleeping porches, trips to Hyderabad, the long train trip to and from Kodai (with a day’s break in Chennai, then called Madras, in the train station waiting room, with side trips to see sights and to eat at what seemed like very “fancy” restaurants to us), and the many hikes we took in Kodai and the surrounding hills, just to name a few. There is a special thrill of recognition when one reads a book -- memoir or fiction -- that gets many of the details of the author’s -- and one’s own -- life right. This is how Schroth’s memoir affected me. And let me add that the book is well written and flows beautifully.