Kim

Orphaned Kimball O'Hara lives on his wits on the streets of Lahore. As a poor white urchin steeped in the language and ways of India, Kim straddles two very different cultures. He yearns to discover his true identity, a riddle somehow connected with a red bull on a green field. The road to enlightenment begins when he crosses the path of an aged Tibetan lama who is on a quest of his own: a spiritual journey to find the river where the Buddha's arrow fell, which will liberate and cleanse him. Kim becomes disciple to the unworldly lama and a powerful bond is forged between the two. But his street-smart credentials also make him eminently useful to the British Secret Service in a dangerous espionage game involving Russian agents... Kipling's picaresque masterpiece combines spy thriller with a journey of self-discovery, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a country he was intimately acquainted with. The deep insight that pervades Kim led critic Nirad C. Chaudhuri to remark that the novel presents a vision whose profundity we Indians would be hard put to match.