Kim

As Creighton and Kim make preparations and leave together for Lucknow, Kim is confirmed in the idea that one of Creighton’s functions is espionage and that the officer might be eyeing Kim for future use in that function. This pleases Kim: “Here was a man after his own heart—a torturous and indirect person playing a hidden game” (100). Kim’s immediate course, however, is to enroll at St. Xavier, the Catholic school in Lucknow, and he parts from Creighton in that city and hires a coach to take him to the school. As they approach, Kim sees his old lama waiting outside the gates, and they share a poignant reunion. Knowing the arrangements for Kim to be sent there, the lama has been waiting for his arrival to see the boy well begun in his schooling. The lama intends to go back to Benares but promises to check in on Kim occasionally.

Kim adapts well to life at the school, in part because his classmates are all deeply familiar with Indian life and culture. Though themselves “sahibs,” they have been born and raised in India and share with Kim an appreciation for its diverse beauty and a taste for adventure. None, however, are quite so thoroughly enculturated as Kim, so he does not share his background in any great detail with the others. When the end of the term comes, a plan is made to send him to the regimental barracks until the next term, but he makes his own plan instead. He sneaks out to a brothel and convinces a woman to dye his skin so that he can pass again as a native Hindu boy, and then he spends the duration of his school holiday roaming the roads of India. Creighton and Mahbub Ali share a conversation about Kim’s disappearance, with Creighton initially concerned, but Ali assures him that Kim is back in his native element and is sure to turn up again. Kim does indeed turn up at the end of the chapter, pledging tongue-in-cheek to Ali that, despite appearances, the school is having its desired effect: “I shall soon be altogether a Sahib” (111).

Ali draws Kim into a discreet discussion of the work of espionage—which Ali often refers to simply as “the game”—and an assessment of the two characters’ ties to one another. Kim reveals to Ali that, upon his earlier dispatchment with the secret message to Umballa, he had observed people searching through Ali’s possessions, and so he realized the sort of work they were involved in and what the possible costs might be. Ali has Kim transform his dress from Hindu to Muslim so that the boy can accompany his horse-trading caravan along the next journey. Kim goes to rest with the workers in the caravan, sleeping amid the parked trucks, and while there, he overhears a whispered conversation nearby. Two faquirs have come to assassinate Ali, but not seeing Ali with the caravan, they find a hiding spot to await his arrival in the morning. Hearing this, Kim manages to warn Ali, who then advises a white police officer that two thieves are lingering by the caravan and has them arrested. Kim’s quick thinking and cunning use of information leave Ali grateful for the boy’s help and impressed yet again with his cleverness.

While accompanying Ali, Kim has been using the horse-trader’s influence as an intermediary to negotiate the terms of his education. Kim enjoys his schooling in Lucknow but wants the freedom to wander the open roads on school holidays and not be sent back to the barracks. So Creighton arranges for Kim to board with a man called Lurgan in the city of Simla until the school term starts back up again, with the intimation that Lurgan may help advance Kim’s prospects for serving in espionage. 

Now in the house of Lurgan (usually referred to as “Lurgan Sahib”), Kim encounters in his host a character unlike any he has met up to this point. Lurgan is a white man, but like Kim, he is thoroughly saturated with Indian culture in all its richness and diversity. At the shop in Simla, Kim observes Lurgan using native mysticism to work magic, a sight so startling that it drives Kim’s mind to race for consolation to the clarity of Western mathematics: “[…] his mind leaped up from a darkness that was swallowing it and took refuge in—the multiplication-table in English!” (130). While with Lurgan, Kim learns to study the dress and habits of all the people who come to the shop. A small Hindu boy also lives there with Lurgan, and at first, the boy is intensely jealous of Kim and hostile to him. The boy proves useful, though, in helping to teach Kim “the Jewel Game,” a method of training in accurate observation and memory. The game involves looking over an array of items on a tray for a set period and then putting the tray out of sight while attempting to accurately describe the items. The boy proves better than Kim at this exercise, having practiced it more regularly, but Kim excels in another exercise: learning to disguise himself in the garb and habits of various sets of people. All these exercises were aimed at Kim’s training in espionage, and by the end of his stay with Lurgan, he has become a promising candidate.

As Kim demonstrates one of his disguises to Lurgan, a new character enters the shop: Hurree Chunder Mookherjee, usually referred to as Hurree Babu, or simply as “the Babu.” The Babu, one of the British survey’s deftest Indian agents, is impressed by Kim’s display and urges Lurgan to have Kim approved for fieldwork as a chain-main (an agent for the British ethnographic survey, which doubled as its intelligence agency). Kim’s return to school and his subsequent education are given in a very brief account of his three years at St. Xavier’s, which closes with the reappearance of the lama, who has paused his search for the Arrow River until Kim can join him again.

Kim accompanies Mahbub Ali on a short venture, in which Ali instructs Kim how to steal information without being discovered and gives the young man a gun to carry. Upon their return, Kim is sent back to St. Xavier’s, but Ali and Lurgan prevail upon Colonel Creighton to allow Kim to take up the role of an agent, at least in a small and provisional way. They feel that he is ready for the job and that his gifts are too considerable to waste with more time at school. As Ali says, “He has [experience] already, Sahib—as a fish controls the water he swims in. But for every reason it will be well to loose him from the school” (147). Some discussion is made of a sensitive operation in the south overseen by agent E23, but Creighton thinks this too difficult for Kim. In the end, they decide to let Kim return to the lama’s company for six months (under some loose oversight from the Babu) and have him gather intelligence as he goes along the road.

Ali (with the Babu nearby) takes Kim to the house of Huneefa, a woman who will aid Kim’s disguise by dyeing away his whiteness. While there, she also performs a magical incantation over Kim for his protection, which troubles the agnostic Babu. The Babu later completes his disguise, arraying Kim in the proper clothes of a lama’s chela and giving him an amulet that functions as the sign of a secret agent.