Kim remains a character defined by the love of his various father figures and embraced by a maternal India that reflects back and nourishes the unconditional love that is afforded him. The effect of love in Kipling's most successful novel reads as ‘a permanent stabilization-destabilization between the Symbolic […] and the semiotic’. In Kipling's fiction that deals with adults in India, however, the picture becomes a darker, more terrifying one. It is a ‘Mother India, wan and thin’, which ‘takes the young civilian in’ and kills him ‘swiftly as [she] may’, that characterises his image of his birthplace in Plain Tales and Life's Handicap. How do we move from a tender and loving vision of India, typified in Kim's yearning for ‘the soft caress of mud squishing up between his toes’ (Kim, p. 173) to a frightening dystopian image of a cholera-ridden, droughtstricken Mother India who ‘audit[s] her accounts with a red pencil’ (LH, p. 149)? This chapter will attempt to deal with this complex question.

The ‘bitter waters of […] despair’ that Punch is forced to drink during his time at Downe Lodge resurface in certain stories that feature imperial workers carrying out the work of Empire in an India that resembles a hellish abyss. The devastating loss that Punch experienced in exile from his privileged Anglo-Indian environment is replicated in those characters that equally confront the vagaries of loss – loss of self/ identity, as in ‘To be Filed for Reference’; of childhood, for example ‘Little Tobrah’; of sanity, in stories such as ‘The Mark of the Beast’; of colonial status in ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, and of love, as poignantly captured in ‘On Greenhow Hill’.