Who Is Kim, What Is Kim?
By birth Kim is a white, Irish boy, Kimball O'Hara, whose father was a soldier in an Irish regiment. But, as we see in Chapter 1, he has grown up, as an orphan on the streets of Lahore, 'a poor white of the very poorest', looked after by a half-cast woman, probably a prostitute; 'she smoked opium and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait'. With his skin 'burned black as any native' he looks and lives like a low-caste Hindu street-urchin, unable to read or write, or speak English very well, and known to all as 'Little…
