'Kim'

In his novel, Kim, written in 1901,Rudyard Kipling describes the Grand Trunk Road, stretching from Calcutta to Kabul, as "a wonderful spectacle" that "runs straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred miles - such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world".

Kim is a celebration of an imperial regime in which the English are often deceived and despised. It is also an exaltation of a tumultuous multicultural world in which the drama is driven by an Afghan horse dealer, a Tibetan lama who draws pictures of the Wheel of Life, a retired native soldier of the British Army, a virago from the northern hills, an obese Bengali clerk, a very peculiar Sahib shopkeeper and the eponymous hero, the orphan son of an Irish drunk, who chooses to spend much of the novel disguised as a low-caste Hindu boy.

Kim befriends an aged Tibetan Lama who is on a quest to free himself from the Wheel of Things by finding the legendary 'River of the Arrow'. Kim becomes his chela, or disciple, and accompanies him on his journey. On the way, Kim incidentally learns about parts of the Great Game of the European powers who wish to exploit India, and is recruited by Mahbub Ali to carry a message to the head of British intelligence in Umballa. This is where Kim's trip with the lama reaches the Grand Trunk Road.

Following a route that was used by Alexander the Great, the road is the oldest and longest highway in southern Asia, though it was not mapped officially until the 16th century. When the British came to India in the 17th century, they gave it the name by which it is now known and it became the main highway for trade and conquest, as well as the starting point for countless emigrant journeys that ended in cities all over Britain.

Kim and the Buddhist monk are entertained by the headmaster and priest of Umballa. Kim, who loves to play jokes and games, pretends he is a prophet and "forsees" a great war with eight thousand troops heading to the northern border, drawing on what he had heard from the British colonel to whom he had delivered secret documents earlier in the day. An old Indian soldier, who had fought on the British side in the Great Mutiny of 1857, calls Kim's claims to question until Kim makes an accurate description of the colonel-which convinces the soldier of his authenticity.

The old soldier, with renewed respect, accompanies Kim and the lama the next morning to the Grand Trunk Road. During their journey, the lama preaches to the soldier the virtues of maintaining detachment from worldly items, emotions, and actions in order to attain Enlightenment; however, when the lama goes out of his way to entertain a small child with a song, the soldier teases him for showing affection. It is the first evidence of the lama's truly human struggle with his Buddhist culture which insists he should maintain distance from his human emotions.

"The lama squatted under the shade of a mango, whose shadow played checkerwise over his face; the soldier sat stiffly on the pony; and Kim, making sure that there were no snakes, lay down in the crotch of the twisted roots.

There was a drowsy buzz of small life in hot sunshine, a cooing of doves, and a sleepy drone of well-wheels across the fields. Slowly and impressively the lama began. At the end of ten minutes the old soldier slid from his pony, to hear better as he said, and sat with the reins round his wrist. The lama's voice faltered, the periods lengthened. Kim was busy watching a grey squirrel. When the little scolding bunch of fur, close pressed to the branch, disappeared, preacher and audience were fast asleep, the old officer's strong-cut head pillowed on his arm, the lama's thrown back against the tree-bole, where it showed like yellow ivory. A naked child toddled up, stared, and, moved by some quick impulse of reverence, made a solemn little obeisance before the lama--only the child was so short and fat that it toppled over sideways, and Kim laughed at the sprawling, chubby legs. The child, scared and indignant, yelled aloud.

'Hai! Hai!' said the soldier, leaping to his feet. 'What is it? What orders? ... It is ... a child! I dreamed it was an alarm. Little one--little one--do not cry. Have I slept? That was discourteous indeed!'

'I fear! I am afraid!' roared the child.

'What is it to fear? Two old men and a boy? How wilt thou ever make a soldier, Princeling?'

The lama had waked too, but, taking no direct notice of the child, clicked his rosary.

'What is that?' said the child, stopping a yell midway. 'I have never seen such things. Give them me.'

'Aha.' said the lama, smiling, and trailing a loop of it on the grass:

This is a handful of cardamoms, This is a lump of ghi: This is millet and chillies and rice, A supper for thee and me!

The child shrieked with joy, and snatched at the dark, glancing beads.

'Oho!' said the old soldier. 'Whence hadst thou that song, despiser of this world?'

'I learned it in Pathankot--sitting on a doorstep,' said the lama shyly. 'It is good to be kind to babes.'

'As I remember, before the sleep came on us, thou hadst told me that marriage and bearing were darkeners of the true light, stumbling-blocks upon the Way. Do children drop from Heaven in thy country? Is it the Way to sing them songs?'

'No man is all perfect,' said the lama gravely, recoiling the rosary. 'Run now to thy mother, little one.'

'Hear him!' said the soldier to Kim. 'He is ashamed for that he has made a child happy. There was a very good householder lost in thee, my brother. Hai, child!' He threw it a pice. 'Sweetmeats are always sweet.' And as the little figure capered away into the sunshine: 'They grow up and become men. Holy One, I grieve that I slept in the midst of thy preaching. Forgive me.'

'We be two old men,' said the lama. 'The fault is mine. I listened to thy talk of the world and its madness, and one fault led to the next.'

'Hear him! What harm do thy Gods suffer from play with a babe? And that song was very well sung. Let us go on and I will sing thee the song of Nikal Seyn before Delhi--the old song.'

And they fared out from the gloom of the mango tope, the old man's high, shrill voice ringing across the field, as wail by long-drawn wail he unfolded the story of Nikal Seyn [Nicholson]--the song that men sing in the Punjab to this day. Kim was delighted, and the lama listened with deep interest.

(Brigadier-General John Nicholson (11 December 1822 - 23 September 1857) was a Victorian era military officer known for his role in British India. A charismatic and authoritarian figure, Nicholson created a legend for himself as a political officer under Henry Lawrence in the frontier provinces of the British Empire in India. He was instrumental in the settlement of the North-West Frontier[1] and played a legendary part in the Indian Mutiny.)

'Ahi! Nikal Seyn is dead--he died before Delhi! Lances of the North, take vengeance for Nikal Seyn.' He quavered it out to the end, marking the trills with the flat of his sword on the pony's rump.

'And now we come to the Big Road,' said he, after receiving the compliments of Kim; for the lama was markedly silent. 'It is long since I have ridden this way, but thy boy's talk stirred me. See, Holy One--the Great Road which is the backbone of all Hind. For the most part it is shaded, as here, with four lines of trees; the middle road--all hard--takes the quick traffic. In the days before rail-carriages the Sahibs travelled up and down here in hundreds. Now there are only country-carts and such like. Left and right is the rougher road for the heavy carts--grain and cotton and timber, fodder, lime and hides. A man goes in safety here for at every few koss is a police-station. The police are thieves and extortioners (I myself would patrol it with cavalry--young recruits under a strong captain), but at least they do not suffer any rivals. All castes and kinds of men move here.

'Look! Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, pilgrims and potters--all the world going and coming. It is to me as a river from which I am withdrawn like a log after a flood.'

And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred miles--such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world. They looked at the green-arched, shade-flecked length of it, the white breadth speckled with slow-pacing folk; and the two-roomed police-station opposite.

'Who bears arms against the law?' a constable called out laughingly, as he caught sight of the soldier's sword. 'Are not the police enough to destroy evil-doers?'

'It was because of the police I bought it,' was the answer. 'Does all go well in Hind?'

'Rissaldar Sahib, all goes well.'

'I am like an old tortoise, look you, who puts his head out from the bank and draws it in again. Ay, this is the Road of Hindustan. All men come by this way...'