Rudyard Kipling · 1901 · road

Kipling's 1901 novel of the Grand Trunk Road and the Great Game. Kimball O'Hara, orphan son of an Irish colour-sergeant, runs barefoot in the Lahore bazaars and passes for Indian so completely that nobody thinks to ask. He attaches himself to a Tibetan lama searching for the River of the Arrow, and to Mahbub Ali the horse-trader, who has a message that needs carrying to Umballa - so the same road carries a holy quest and a piece of espionage at once, and Kim serves both without seeing a contradiction. Four years, from thirteen to seventeen, across the whole width of British India: the Trunk Road south to Benares, a Catholic school in Lucknow, a spy's apprenticeship at Simla, and then up into the snows after two foreign agents. Its geography is the argument - a country too large and too various for anyone to hold in one hand, least of all the people administering it.

1. 1
   Lahore

   The Zam-Zammah gun outside the Wonder House, and a boy sitting astride it in defiance of municipal orders. Kim is white, speaks and dreams in Hindustani, and is known through the bazaars as Friend of All the World. An old Tibetan lama arrives looking for a river, and Kim - who has never had a purpose - appoints himself his chela on the spot.

2. 2
   Umballa

   Mahbub Ali the horse-trader gives Kim a folded paper - the pedigree of a white stallion - to carry to a certain Englishman here. Kim delivers it and then hides under a table to hear what it does: a war on the northern border, eight thousand men moving. It is his first act in the Great Game and he does it for the fun of it. Down the road he finds the Red Bull on a green field of his father's prophecy - the flag of his father's regiment - and the sahibs take him.

3. 3
   Benares

   South down the Grand Trunk Road, the backbone of Hind - Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, all the world going and coming. The lama settles at the Temple of the Tirthankars and quietly pays three hundred rupees a year to have his chela educated as a sahib, which is the last thing either of them wants.

4. 4
   Lucknow

   St Xavier's in Partibus, and three years of being made into an Englishman - surveying, mathematics, map-making. Kim escapes into the bazaar whenever he can and changes caste like a coat. The school is teaching him the skills; the holidays are teaching him the trade.

5. 5
   Simla

   Lurgan Sahib's shop of jewels and masks and devil-dance ghost-daggers, and the Play of the Jewels - fifteen stones on a tray, a moment to look, and then tell me what you saw. Kim is being finished here: memory, observation, disguise. Creighton, Mahbub and Hurree Babu are all measuring him.

6. 6
   Saharanpur

   The old Kulu woman's house, and the lama waiting. Hurree Babu arrives with a proposal: two foreign agents are in the northern hills with a bag of papers, and a boy travelling as a holy man's disciple can go where a Bengali cannot. They persuade the lama that the mountain air would do him good.

7. 7
   Shamlegh

   Shamlegh-under-the-Snow. Kipling never puts it on a map; this pin is the hills the book describes and no more than that. Here the Russian strikes the lama, the hillmen turn, and Kim comes away with the kilta - the whole basket of survey papers and letters. The Woman of Shamlegh shelters them and lets him go, and he is not a child afterwards.

8. 8
   Saharanpur (the River)

   Down out of the hills half dead, dragging the papers, into the old woman's house and a fever that lasts weeks. Kim wakes asking what he is - 'I am Kim. And what is Kim?' - and hands the kilta to Hurree Babu. In a brook at the bottom of the garden the lama finds his River of the Arrow, and comes back to say he has been freed of the Wheel and has waited to free his chela too. Neither of them has to choose; Kipling lets both quests end in the same field.