Notes on Kipling's "Kim."

It's been a week or so since I recorded the last chapter, so all I wanted to do was set down a few thoughts that may not be commonplace. The touchstone for this is the most recent novel in the great Tony Hillerman's Indian Country mysteries, "The Shape Shifter." (SPOILER WARNING!) Writing about a hundred years after Kipling, he turns the story inside out. Of course, the comparison between these two may be only coincidental. In Kim, the student or orphan/protege is white, and a master of disguise; he is educated, and even brought to salvation and holiness, by his mentor, the Tibetan Teshoo Lama. In Hillerman's "The Shape Shifter," the mentor is a white American psychopathic serial killer, who fancies himself a predator, and ordinary people nothing more than sheep to feed on. His southeast-Asian orphan/protege is trained only to cook and clean, being too decent to exploit others routinely. Justice, in the end, is meted out by people of color. That's really something both books share, and the reason Kipling's story goes beyond mere jingoistic "Rule Brittania" blather, though traces of it coming from the Indian characters do occur in the book, and may be wishful thinking on his part. In the end, the love the characters feel for each other, beautifully shown in action (the Sahiba, Teshoo Lama, Kim) and restraint (Mahbub Ali), pushes the issues of color, creed, and caste completely off stage.