Recent events prove that Kim and its biography Quest for Kim: In Search of Kiplings Great Game are still relevant Rudyard kiplings Kim is such a beloved book,with an unfathomable capaciousness to entertain multiple readings,that you dont really need a provocation to pick up the book again. But such is the books currency that current events keep returning us to its themes. Osama bin Ladens death in his Abbottabad safe-house is,of course,an obvious reminder about the Great Game that never ceases day and night,as a character in the book intoned. And even if,on revisiting Kims story yet again this week,the novel seemed to hark back to more innocent times,it was difficult not to be drawn hurriedly into the story,for fear that the story would somehow reveal itself to be darker than it was. There appears to be a secret at the heart of the novel,and even as you strain to discover it,another part of you wants the secret to remain beyond discovery. It wasnt discovered,of course. And it may have helped that I went back to Kim,not through Kiplings original text,but through Peter Hopkirks Quest for Kim: In Search of Kiplings Great Game. More than a decade ago,Hopkirk,historian of the Great Game,set out in the footsteps of Kim,and his travelogue is the best book about a book that there can be. Its the biography of the novel and its map,and to reread it proves to be as calming as the original is. Book in hand,Hopkirk hits the Grand Trunk Road,Kiplings river of life,the arc where the world is sorted out. He starts out,of course,from Lahore,repeating Kims great opening lines: He sat,in defiance of municipal orders,astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib Gher the Wonder House,as the natives call the Lahore Museum. For Kipling,there was much self-referencing here,because the Museum was his playground,it was an institution nurtured by his father. The gun is still opposite the Lahore Museum,in whose shadow there is now a bookshop named,what else,Kim. Hopkirk,the historian,however,shatters the widely-held assumption that little has changed in the museum since Kipling described it so lovingly in Kim. The new museum was opened to the public after Kipling left India for good,and the treasures later housed there were earlier displayed next door,in a building constructed for the famous Punjab Exhibition of 1864. And even as Kim strikes his enduring friendship with the wise old lama,Hopkirk goes into the antecedents of familiar friends: Mahbub Ali,Colonel Creighton,and later folks like Lurgan Sahib and the Babu. The railway station,where secretive operatives of the Great Game melt into the multitudes on their way to somewhere else,comes alive,as does the 3.25 am train to Ambala,though,of course,Hopkirk cannot hop on to it as it does not exist curiously,he takes Kipling at his word that there was such a train,because the journalist in Kipling obviously based every character,every building,every transaction on fact. That unquestioning belief is worth underlining,because it sustains Hopkirks conviction that the Colonel Creightons bungalow in Saharanpur,where Kim must deliver Mahbub Alis mysterious package,exists. I wont tell you whether he finds,or how,but the urgency in getting on with it is fascinating,because by now Hopkirks quest for the milestones and men on Kims journey is now dictated by the Road. The Road doesnt allow him time to linger though he does steal a quick visit to Mussoorie it dictates the pace of his travelogue,just as it did Kiplings novel. mini.kapoor@expressindia.com
