Kim

At Umballa, Kim slips into the Englishman’s garden, delivers the paper, then lies hidden in the flowerbeds and listens. The “pedigree” was a warning: a group of northern kings, egged on by a foreign power, is preparing for war, and the British will answer with eight thousand men and guns. Kim says nothing to the lama, but he rather enjoys knowing.

Then comes the road. The pair ride a crowded third-class train, where Kim charms and cheats his way into everyone’s good books, and set off on foot down the Grand Trunk Road, which Kipling calls “such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.” This is the heart of the book: wedding processions and policemen, Brahmins and barbers, pilgrims, moneylenders, holy men and thieves, all moving under the trees in the white dust. An old soldier who fought for the British in the rebellion of 1857 rides a stage with them, remembers the uprising as a madness, and treats Kim like a grandson. A garrulous widow from the hill country of Kulu, travelling in a curtained bullock-cart with a small army of servants, adopts them both, haggles with the lama for charms and prayers for her grandchildren, and never once stops talking. Kipling simply calls her the Sahiba.

Kim is in heaven: begging, bargaining, lying for the sheer craft of it. The lama drifts through the same scenes serenely, treating the world as an illusion and its kindnesses as gifts. Between them is a love that neither quite expected.

Kipling, who spoke Hindustani with servants as a small child in Bombay, gives every one of these people a voice. The dialogue is full of old-fashioned “thee” and “thou,” his way of signalling that we are hearing Indian languages rendered into English, and the effect is of a whole continent talking at once. It is the least hurried adventure story ever written, and that is its charm: the plot can wait while a farmer argues about his sick child or a policeman jokes about the soldier’s sword.

One evening they reach an army camp, and over it flies a flag with a red bull on a green field. It is the Mavericks, Kim’s father’s old Irish regiment. Creeping close to look, Kim is caught. The chaplains open his amulet — the stiff Anglican, Mr Bennett, and the warmer, wiser Catholic, Father Victor — and realize that this native-looking beggar boy is the son of one of their own. The prophecy has come true, and it is a trap. The regiment means to make him a Sahib: an orphanage, a drummer’s uniform, boots.

The lama is heartbroken but accepts that his chela belongs to another world. Then he astonishes everyone. Through a Jain temple in Benares he arranges to pay three hundred rupees a year so that Kim can go to the best school in India, St Xavier’s in Lucknow. The officers simply cannot understand how a begging priest can pay for a white boy’s education.

Someone else is paying attention. The Englishman who received the stallion’s pedigree is Colonel Creighton, a scholarly officer of the Ethnological Survey who quietly runs British intelligence in India. A boy who can pass for anything, who knows the bazaars from the inside and keeps his mouth shut, is exactly what he needs. When Kim begs Mahbub Ali to help him escape the regiment, Mahbub refuses kindly: “Once a Sahib, always a Sahib.” Kim, staring at his new boots, is not at all sure.

St Xavier’s teaches Kim mathematics, surveying and how to be an Englishman, and he learns, sulkily at first and then hungrily, because he is quick and because Creighton has promised him work on the Survey of India. But on his first holiday he gets a dancing-girl to stain his skin, spins her a story about a sweetheart, and vanishes into the crowds. Creighton, rather than punishing him, is impressed.

After that the holidays become a second, secret school. Mahbub Ali takes him north with his horse caravan, and in a railway yard one night Kim overhears two men planning to shoot Mahbub as he sleeps; he fakes a screaming nightmare to slip away unnoticed and warns his friend in the dark. Then Mahbub delivers him to Simla, to the shop of Lurgan Sahib, a dealer in jewels, masks and curiosities who is one of Creighton’s most gifted operators. Lurgan tests the boy at once: he smashes a jar and, with a hand on Kim’s neck, tries to make him see it whole again. Kim feels the illusion closing over him and breaks it by reciting his multiplication tables — in English. Lurgan is delighted.

Then the training begins: the Jewel Game, in which a tray of stones is shown for a minute, covered, and described down to the last flaw; disguise; the art of becoming someone else completely. Here Kim also meets Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, a stout Bengali “babu” with a Calcutta degree, a magnificently peculiar English and a dream of being elected to the Royal Society. He looks like comedy. He turns out to be one of the bravest people in the book.

Kipling makes the contrast plain without spelling it out. One school, St Xavier’s, is turning Kim into a Sahib; the other, run by Creighton’s people, is teaching him to be anyone at all. Kim, characteristically, enjoys both, and finds the moments when he can slip back into a dhoti and squat by a cooking fire the sweetest of all.

After three years, at about sixteen, Kim is released. In a room above a tobacco shop in Lucknow, a blind courtesan named Huneefa stains him, dresses him as a young Buddhist novice and chants him under magical protection, while Hurree hands him a small silver amulet: the hidden badge of Creighton’s service, with a password to go with it. Kim rejoins the lama, who has spent the years waiting patiently at the temple in Benares. Their search resumes, but now Kim carries a second life folded inside the first.

It is tested almost at once. On a train Kim meets a terrified man in a torn shirt, a Mahratta agent known only as E23, with killers on his heels. Using ash, a painted caste-mark, a rewound turban-cloth and pure nerve, Kim turns him in minutes into a wild-haired holy man so convincing that his pursuers look straight through him. Kim feels the thrill of the Game “with a vengeance.”

They stop again with the Sahiba, now settled near Saharunpore. The lama, who has begun to long for his mountains, decides the River might be found in the hills. By the happiest of coincidences — though nothing in this book is really a coincidence — Hurree has urgent business up there too.

Two foreign agents, a Russian and a Frenchman, are mapping the Himalayan passes and carrying letters from two hill rajahs, Hilás and Bunár, who have agreed to sell them the way into India. Hurree attaches himself to them as an eager, cowardly-seeming guide, playing the silly babu so well that they never suspect he is steering them to ruin.

High among the snow peaks, Kim and the lama meet the strangers. The lama has drawn a beautiful chart of the Wheel of Life, and the Russian wants to buy it. When the old man refuses, the Russian snatches at it, tears it, and strikes him in the face. Every Irish devil in Kim’s blood wakes up; he hurls the man down the hillside and gets him by the throat. The hill porters, horrified by the sacrilege, flee into the dusk with all the baggage — including a basket full of maps, letters and reports.

At Shamlegh, a cluster of huts under the snow, the porters divide the loot. Kim claims the papers. With help from the Woman of Shamlegh — a hill woman who was once a Christian convert and was left behind by an Englishman who promised to come back for her — he goes through the baskets, keeps everything that matters, wraps it in oilskin and tips the rest off a cliff. Hurree, meanwhile, leads the beaten foreigners down the mountains, sympathetic to the last.

But the blow has hurt the lama somewhere deeper than his face. In the moment he was struck, he wanted the porters to kill the Russian. “Just is the Wheel, swerving not a hair!” he says: his love of the hills was a kind of pride, and the River must lie in the plains after all. They must go down.

The descent nearly finishes them both. The lama travels in a litter carried by hill-men; Kim walks beside him, worn thin and feverish, guarding the oilskin packet against his chest. By the time they reach the Sahiba’s house, Kim has collapsed. The old woman takes charge, and with herbs, massage and nonstop scolding she bullies him back towards life.

Hurree arrives, takes the packet, and almost bursts with pride: the mission is a triumph, the foreign plot is broken, and the boy is the hero of it. But Kim, now free of his burden, comes apart. His body is weak and his mind feels like a gear that has slipped off its machine. In the book’s most famous passage he sits staring at the world and repeats, “I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?” Then the tears come, and with an almost audible click, the world locks back into place: roads are for walking, fields for ploughing, people for talking to. He lies down on the warm earth beside an empty cart and sleeps.

While Kim slept, the lama fasted and meditated for two days and nights. Now he comes to tell his chela what happened. His soul rose free of his body and saw the whole of India at once, every place and every person; he was on the very brink of release into the Great Soul when he remembered his disciple, and he turned back. Coming to himself, he found he had fallen into a stream, and Hurree, disguised as a doctor, was holding his head above the water. It was the River of the Arrow — right here, behind a mango grove, at their feet. The Search is over. He has won freedom for himself and he has given it up, for now, to bring Kim with him.

The novel ends on the old man’s smile, “as a man may who has won salvation for himself and his beloved.” Nearby, Mahbub Ali is waiting to carry Kim back to the Great Game, and Creighton has a job ready for him. Kipling never says which way the boy goes. He leaves him exactly where he has always been happiest: between two worlds, loved by both.

It is a strange and moving ending for a spy novel. The Great Game has been won in the mountains, but the book’s real climax is a frail old man in a borrowed house telling a boy he loves that they are both saved. Readers have argued ever since whether Kim will become a professional agent, a seeker, or somehow both — and whether Kipling, who loved both worlds as much as his hero did, could have imagined any answer that didn’t break his heart.

Kim delivers the paper to Colonel Creighton at Umballa and, hiding in the garden, learns it was a warning of war in the north. Then he and the lama walk the Grand Trunk Road, which Kipling calls “such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world”: pilgrims, wedding parties, policemen, moneylenders, an old soldier who fought for the British in 1857, and a chattering widow from Kulu who adopts them both. Kim begs, bargains and lies with joy; the lama floats through it all in serene contemplation. But when Kim stumbles on a camp flying a red bull on a green field — his dead father’s regiment — the chaplains open his amulet, discover he is white, and set out to make him a Sahib. The heartbroken lama, astonishingly, pays for him to attend the best school in India, St Xavier’s in Lucknow. Creighton, who secretly runs British intelligence, has plans for the boy.

Kim studies mapmaking and mathematics at school, but in the holidays he learns a different trade. Travelling north with Mahbub Ali, he overhears two assassins and saves his friend’s life. In Simla the jeweller Lurgan Sahib tries to hypnotize him into seeing a broken jar made whole — Kim breaks the spell by reciting his times tables in English — and trains his memory with the Jewel Game. He also meets Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, a comic-seeming Bengali “babu” who is actually a superb agent. At about sixteen Kim is released from school, rejoins the lama, and on a train saves a hunted spy by disguising him as a holy man in minutes. He now carries two lives at once: disciple and spy. Being a spy thrills him; being a disciple holds his heart. For now, he sees no reason he can’t be both.

Kim, the lama and Hurree climb into the Himalayas, where a Russian and a Frenchman are buying the loyalty of hill rajahs. When the Russian tears the lama’s painting of the Wheel of Life and strikes him, Kim attacks, the porters flee with the foreigners’ baggage, and Kim seizes their secret papers. But the lama is shaken by his own flash of anger and decides they must return to the plains. The journey down almost kills them both. At the widow’s house, Kim hands over the papers, then breaks down, asking “what is Kim?” before the world settles back around him. The lama tells him he has found the River at last, and that he turned back from his own release so that Kim could share it. Mahbub waits to take Kim back to the Game. Kipling never says which path he chooses.