My name is Kim, and my life began in a heap of shite. I was born in a diseased backstreet of Lahore to a syphilitic Irish squaddie and his bedraggled compatriot filly, who both then promptly died. My life proceeded through further heaps of shite: a childhood spent thieving apples from market stalls and performing services for bearded trader-pederasts from Peshawar. Occasionally, after running assignations for an elderly sorceress/prostitute called Huneefa, I would straddle the great green-bronze Zam-Zammah gun (‘the fire breathing dragon of the Punjab’) opposite the old Ajaib-Gheir, in a mighty phallic gesture suggestive of late-Victorian discourses of imperial masculinity. That was the only non-shite bit.
Relief came in the form of a visitor to Lahore, an old Tibetan monk in travel-soiled maroon robes. He ignored my offers of ‘lovely carpet – nice girl – hashish best price’ and instead mumbled over the flicking of rosary beads about a river, the River of the Arrow, formed in ancient times by an arrow fired by the Buddha, who was fantastic at archery apparently. The monk wanted to bathe in said river, to free himself from the Wheel of Things. Personally, I really like Things, and want to have as many of them as possible; but, fair enough, I thought, each to their own. So I endeavoured to follow him in his quest and carry his rucksack and steal apples for him, in return for pretty much nothing – besides the odd go on his prayer wheel, which had its limits. And so I took my first step on the Road to Imperial Manhood, a road which was back then kept in spiffing order by satrap native police officers and paid for by the conscientious taxation of a grateful local peasantry. The shite-ness was ebbing a bit.
Months passed, stuff happened, my balls dropped and hair proliferated in strange places. Through an entirely coherent and rational chain of events, I was conscripted by the British to run around northern India ferrying intelligence documents from surly Afghan chieftains (where were the jolly ones, I kept wondering) to sweaty white Sahibs with monocles and detachable collars (who were also not very jolly) – all to show the Russians who really wore the pith helmet in India. The Great Game, it was called, or as Colonel Creighton, one of my monocle and detachable collar wearing mentors, put it: ‘This here is little more than a game of cricket in the shires, followed by sandwiches. Merely substitute the village green with an arid high-altitude valley in the Hindu Kush, the fielders with hostile Pashtun tribesmen wielding plundered Enfield rifles, and the rules of play with no rules at all – and, hey presto. Now let’s get you kitted up with some field binoculars and a belt of faulty grenades, and the fun can begin!’ I felt a whole new wave of shite to be swiftly oncoming.
The Colonel, who clocked me as a white boy, a Sahib, despite my turban and pointed slippers – ‘let’s just forget that you were born poor, and Irish, and a bastard, shall we?’ – had many lessons to impart, generally about the white man’s dreary burden in undermining native industries and playing bridge on bungalow verandas. The secret to British rule in India, he said, was two-fold: an insistence on sit-down loos in the face of the most formidable challenges ever mounted to plumbing; and the richness and variety of our lawn sports. ‘The French may have boules, a vigorous sport admittedly. But we have croquet. And I think we might reasonably lay claim to women’s archery.’ He paused for effect. ‘Did the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb return from campaigns to send coloured wooden balls on their graceful passage through iron hoops, to the blushing admiration of his concubines? No. I doubt the chap even kept a decent patch of lawn on which one could play croquet. I rest my case. Now, Kim, let us share another can of tinned salmon, over a game of bridge. You shuffle.’ In retrospect, the Colonel liked to speak a lot of shite.
My training has been dreary. I haven’t even encountered a Russian yet; maybe they’re just a figment of the British imperial imagination, like Frenchmen. In mid April, as the heat and dust of the plains have Britishers across the Indian Civil Service suppressing the urge to detach their collars, I have been told to go up to Simla. There I am to begin an immersion course in Espionage and Advanced Bridge with a Persian gem trader (and rumoured bridge cheat) called Lurgan Sahib. ‘Plentiful young memsahibs up there away from their husbands,’ the Colonel winked. He then said something I couldn’t understand about the carefree cultivation of un-tame cereal. Sounds pretty shite.
Kimball ‘Kim’ O’Hara, North-Western Provinces, British India, 1895.
