Kim

KIM begins in Lahore, West Punjab, in the last quarter of the 19th Century. Thirteen year old Irish orphan Kimberley O'Hara has been raised by a half-caste woman who turned his ex-sergeant father into an opium addict. Kim O'Hara is already a master of disguise. He can pass (though he does not choose to) as a young white sahib. Or a low-caste Hindu boy or a Mohammedan. He is mad for anything new and will spare all the time it takes to investigate a novelty. *** One such novelty that befalls Kim one day at the great cannon ZamZammah before the Wonder House (novelist Rudyard Kipling is a master of capitalizing words to show their importance), or native museum of Lahore. A tall Red Lama, a former abbot of a monastery in Tibet, appears, speaking good Urdu and asking Kim for directions. Kim follows the lama into the museum, run for decades by the novelist's father John Lockwood Kipling. What he overhears the monk and the curator speaking begins Kim's education for the next four years in Buddhism, the greatest novelty of his entire life. Kim becomes the lama's willing disciple (chela), begs food and lodging for him and is instructed in the Buddhist law. ***If the Lama is the greatest influence on Kim's young life, he is not the only one. A Pathan horse trader in far lands, Mahboob Ali, has had his eye for three or four years on talented, spunky young Kim. The Pathan thinks that Kim will make the greatest spy for the British Raj in India that the world has ever known. And soon he entrusts Kim with a message for Colonel Creighton in Umballa that unleashes a small army against pro-Russian rajas in the hills. And The Great Game is on for Kim. *** Kim is sent away to the best Catholic school in India, in fabled Lucknow, where he excels in mathematics and learns the surveying trade that he needs to play the Great Game. In Simla he is also trained by the mysterious dealer in antiquities, Lurgan Sahib, in mnemonic techniques. Soon Kim can take in the contents of a room or a box of jewels at a single glance. By novel's end, Kim has helped another spy, a fat Bengali Babu, foil a Russian surveyor team come down from Leh in Kashmir. We are left wondering: will Kim stay with his lama and learn the Way or follow his equally beloved Mahboob Ali into thwarting the Russians in the Great Game? *** Rudard Kipling's KIM is among a dozen or so books that this 75-year old book reviewer would want to have if stranded on a desert isle. It has adventure, comparative religions, ethnology, anthropology and the many races of India under the Raj. Kipling brings them all to life and keeps them in memory. -OOO-