This edition includes a biographical afterword. Mahbub is the first glimpse we get of the influence that is to contrast the lama’s Buddhist teachings-he is a horse-dealer, but he is also an agent in the Indian Secret Service. Considered by many as Kipling’s masterpiece, Kim is a classic novel of espionage and adventure which helped bring popular attention to the political and diplomatic confrontation between the British Empire and the Russian Empire in Central and Southern Asia at the end of the 19th century.
But he is not only a lama’s chela. There is another mission that Kim seeks to fulfil, given to him by his old friend and sort-of-mentor, Mahbub Khan the horse-dealer. 'Who watches us across the street' Kim looked up hurriedly and saw Colonel Creighton in tennis-flannels. As the lama’s chela, Kim begins his first journey in search of the river, travelling by train and then on foot along the Grand Trunk Road. Filled with lyrical, exotic prose and nostalgia for Rudyard Kiplings native India, Kim is widely acknowledged as the authors greatest novel and a key. The Irish orphan tags along with the lama, who speaks of Buddhist philosophy and a quest for a mythical ‘River of the Arrow’ with an innocence that is at once affecting and profound. Once upon a time (because at its heart, Kim is a fairy tale), there was an orphan boy named Kimball OHara, Kim for short. The appearance among the milling crowds of a stranger-one that readers immediately recognize from the description as a Buddhist lama, but who is a mystery to the children-breaks up their game, and when Kim appoints himself a helper to this foreigner, turns the course of Kim’s life.
The novel opens with Kim playing on the streets of Lahore, outside the Museum, with two of his friends, one the son of a wealthy Hindu merchant and the other the son of a Muslim sweet-seller, while the law, in the person of a Sikh Policeman, turns an indulgent eye upon the shenanigans of the boys.
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