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Kim the waif wandered at large through the streets and alleyways, the plains and the mountains of 19th century India. Rudyard Kipling, his creator, also roamed through this enchanted land, and elegant Shimla (then spelt Simla), with its swirling social world, would always have a special place in his heart. It was in Shimla that a young Kipling’s talent was given its first big boost and for the first time he received direct public recognition for his witty prologues, recited by his sister, Trix.

In 1883, just after his first visit as a contributor to Lahore’s Civil and Military Gazette, Kipling wrote to Edith Macdonald, his aunt, “The month was a round of picnics, dances, theatricals and so on – and I flirted with the bottled up energy of a year on my lips!”

By then Shimla, once an obscure sanitarium created at the close of the ‘Gurkha Wars’ in 1815-16, was the full blown ‘summer capital’ of the country. This was now the seat of one of the most powerful governments in the world – the Imperial Government of India. From this tiny town, one fifth of the human race was ruled for the better part of year. The Government moved up in early April and stayed till late October or early November – spending more time here than at the ‘real’ capitals, of Calcutta and later, New Delhi. Viceroys, Commanders, Governors and littler ‘tin-gods’ held the strings of an empire that stretched from Burma in the east to Aden in the west. Some called it ‘the workshop of empire’ and others termed it ‘Mount Olympus’. Of this home during the hot months for a few thousand privileged people, an awed visitor wrote: “Every pigeonhole contains a potential revolution, every office box cradles an embryo of a war or death.”

Dashing young men flocked to Shimla out to seek their fortunes. Here came the ‘Grass Widows’- young married ladies escaping the heat and their husbands and quite amenable ‘to a little something or a little someone’ to keep them entertained though these months. The finer specimens of the ‘Fishing Fleet’ wound their way up the narrow mountain paths in search of husbands; those unfortunates who sailed back to England without at least an engagement ring were termed ‘returned empties’. There was the enigmatic club of ‘Black Hearts’ whose members could not commit the offence of living in ‘open matrimony’. Whiffs of scandal floated as freely as Shimla’s monsoon mists.

From this potpourri, Kipling extracted one of literature’s immortals, Mrs. Hauksbee. Flitting through Shimla and the pages of Plain Tales from the Hills she had, “The wisdom of the Serpent, the logical coherence of the Man, the fearlessness of the Child, and the triple intuition of the Woman.” And while she was at it, she was "sometimes nice to her own sex."

In 1885, Lockwood and Alice, Rudyard’s parents, decided to bring the family up to Shimla for the ‘season’. Lockwood Kipling, Curator of the Lahore Museum and illustrator of his son’s books noted that, “Simla is full of pretty girls and has a strong light-brigade of sportive matrons of all ages. I never go near a near a dance, but I hear that the nicest possible girls sit out in rows.”

The Kipling family stayed at the Tendrils, now part of the Cecil Hotel. A couple of hundred metres away was Peterhof, the residence of the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin. Lady Dufferin developed a great liking for the family, swiftly taking them into the inner and uppermost circles of society.

Of all the characters that passed from real-life Shimla to Kipling’s pages, none was as fascinating or enigmatic as A.M. Jacob – the inspiration for ‘Lurgan Sahib’. The young Kim, in the midst of being bundled off to Shimla by Mahbub Ali, the Pathan horse dealer, is told that, “Lurgan Sahib has a shop among the European shops. All Simla knows it. Ask there…and, Friend of all the world, he is one to be obeyed to the last wink of his eyelashes. Men say he does magic, but that should not touch thee. Go up the hill and ask. Here begins the Great Game.”

With a compelling magnetism, A.M. Jacob had arrived in Shimla in the 1870s and went into a business of gemstones and rare curios. Fluent in many languages, Jacob was said to have harnessed the powers of the occult. A friend to some of the most powerful men in the land, he often turned ‘invisible’ to entertain his guests. But the time came when Jacob’s star also went into eclipse and a series of events led to his financial ruin after he was contracted to deliver the ‘Imperial Diamond’ to Sir Mahbub Ali Khan, the Nizam of Hyderabad. The diamond has since become famous as the ‘Jacob Diamond’.

Somewhat changed, many sites that Kipling carried into the bitter-sweet pages of Plain Tales from the Hills (written when he was in his early twenties) and those casually flicked into Kim live on in today’s Shimla. There is the old Club, the wide glade of Annandale where fetes and fancy fairs were held and the Longwood Hotel where the Venus Annodomini and the audacious Mrs. Hauksbee lived. With high rocky banks covered with bergenia, there is the Mashobra Road where the Tertium Quid met his doom. The building that housed Peliti’s – that ‘almost continental café’ – and Combermere Bridge, where the Phantom Rickshaw first accosted Jack Pansay, are all there, as are the descendents of the monkeys that removed the hairbrushes from Kipling’s dressing-table at his one-time residence, Northbank.

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