Kim by Rudyard Kipling Page B

was not in the Army.’
    Father and son swung round together: the old man sitting as erect as the younger.
    A Punjabi constable in yellow linen trousers slouched across the road. He had seen the money pass.
    ‘Halt!’ he cried in impressive English. ‘Know ye not that there is a takkus of two annas a head, which is four annas, on those who enter the Road from this side-road? It is the order of the Sirkar, and the money is spent for the planting of trees and the beautification of the ways.’
    ‘And the bellies of the police,’ said Kim, slipping out of arm’s reach. ‘Consider for a while, man with a mud head. Think you we came from the nearest pond like the frog, thy father-in-law? Hast thou ever heard the name of thy brother?’
    ‘And who was he? Leave the boy alone,’ cried a senior constable, immensely delighted, as he squatted down to smoke his pipe in the veranda.
    ‘He took a label from a bottle of belaitee-pani (soda-water), and, affixing it to a bridge, collected taxes for a month from those who passed, saying that it was the Sirkar’s order. Then came an Englishman and broke his head. Ah, brother, I am a town-crow, not a village-crow!’
    The policeman drew back abashed, and Kim hooted at him all down the road.
    ‘Was there ever such a disciple as I?’ he cried merrily to the lama. ‘All earth would have picked thy bones within ten mile of Lahore city if I had not guarded thee.’
    ‘I consider in my own mind whether thou art a spirit, sometimes, or sometimes an evil imp,’ said the lama, smiling slowly.
    ‘I am thy chela .’ Kim dropped into step at his side—that indescribable gait of the long-distance tramp all the world over.
    ‘Now let us walk,’ muttered the lama, and to the click of his rosary they walked in silence mile upon mile. The lama, as usual, was deep in meditation, but Kim’s bright eyes were open wide. This broad, smiling river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement on the cramped and crowded Lahore streets. There were new people and new sights at every stride—castes he knew and castes that were altogether out of his experience.
    They met a troop of long-haired, strong-scented Sansis with baskets of lizards and other unclean food on their backs, their lean dogs sniffing at their heels. These people kept their own side of the road, moving at a quick, furtive jog-trot, and all other castes gave them ample room; for the Sansi is deep pollution. Behind them, walking wide and stiffly across the strong shadows, the memory of his leg-irons still on him, strode one newly released from the jail; his full stomach and shiny skin to prove that the Government fed its prisoners better than most honest men could feed themselves. Kim knew that walk well, and made broad jest of it as they passed. Then an Akali, a wild-eyed, wild-haired Sikh devotee in the blue-checked clothes of his faith, with polished-steel quoits glistening on the cone of his tall blue turban, stalked past, returning from a visit to one of the independent Sikh States, where he had been singing the ancient glories of the Khalsa to College-trained princelings in top-boots and white-cord breeches. Kim was careful not to irritate that man; for the Akali’s temper is short and his arm quick. Here and there they met or were overtaken by the gaily dressed crowds of whole villages turning out to some local fair; the women, with their babes on their hips, walking behind the men, the older boys prancing on sticks of sugar-cane, dragging rude brass models of locomotives such as they sell for a halfpenny, or flashing the sun into the eyes of their betters from cheap toy mirrors. One could see at a glance what each had bought; and if there were any doubt it needed only to watch the wives comparing, brown arm against brown arm, the newly purchased dull glass bracelets that come from the North-West. These merry-makers stepped slowly, calling one to the other and stopping to haggle with sweetmeat-sellers, or to make a prayer