Rudyard Kipling

Kim Rudyard Kipling

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brickplatform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher-the Wonder House, as the natives call the LahoreMuseum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon', hold the Punjab, for thegreat green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot. There was some justification for Kim-he had kicked Lala Dinanath's boy off thetrunnions-since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burnedblack as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tonguein a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with thesmall boys of the bazar; Kim was white-a poor white of the very poorest. The half-castewoman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a second-handfurniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she wasKim's mother's sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a Colonel's family and hadmarried Kimball O'Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment. Heafterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi Railway, and his Regiment wenthome without him. The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore, and O'Hara fell to drink andloafing up and down the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby. Societies andchaplains, anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but O'Hara drifted away, till he cameacross the woman who took opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whitesdie in India. His estate at death consisted of three papers-one he called his 'ne varietur'because those words were written below his signature thereon, and another his 'clearancecertificate'. The third was Kim's birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in hisglorious opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no account was Kim to partwith them, for they belonged to a great piece of magic-such magic as men practised overyonder behind the Museum, in the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher-the Magic House, as wename the Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim's horn wouldbe exalted between pillars-monstrous pillars-of beauty and strength. The Colonelhimself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finest Regiment in the world, would attend toKim-little Kim that should have been better off than his father. Nine hundred first-classdevils, whose God was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to Kim, if they had not 4forgotten O'Hara-poor O'Hara that was gang-foreman on the Ferozepore line. Then hewould weep bitterly in the broken rush chair on the veranda. So it came about after hisdeath that the woman sewed parchment, paper, and birth-certificate into a leather amuletcase which she strung round Kim's neck.