Born to an Irish father, raised by an Indian prostitute and groomed by the British Secret Service, Kim's identity is situated between three competing discourses, Irish, Indian and Anglo-Indian. This ambivalence in ethnic classification is acknowledged by Kim in his tongue-in-cheek remark to the Pathan horse dealer Mahbub Ali, ‘“but I am a Hindu,” said Kim in English’ (Kim, p. 67). Both a colonial insider (by lineage) and a ‘native’ outsider (by upbringing), Kim's two-sided identity is contained within the phrase used to describe him, ‘Little Friend of all the world’ (Kim, p. 67). Unlike the mournful Mowgli, who can find no home in the Jungle or the man-village, or the Sahib/Black Sheep Punch, who is despised by everyone in England save his sister, Kim is loved and admired by English and Indian alike. The trope of parentage is in this novel established by Kim's affiliative identification with his ‘replacement’ guardians. An orphan with none of the attendant grief at the loss of his parents, Kim is guided through the narrative by a variety of characters vying with one another to be surrogate father figures. Thus his affiliative identification with his substitute fathers, together with the sustaining maternal space of ‘Mother India’, replaces Kim's ‘lost’ Irish father and English mother. The looming horror that characterises Kipling's treatment of India in his earlier stories is retranslated into a vibrant, welcoming India through which his picaresque hero can run with complete safety, frantically trying to exhaust his desire for Mother India. We sense Kipling's adora- tion for the India of his childhood, a protected environment that was filled with ‘light and colour’ (SOM, p. 3), where ‘little Ruddy’ was, like Kim, at the centre of these concentric circles of warmth and intimacy. The food, the landscapes and the peoples of the author's childhood were all to find their harmonious way into Kim, where every aspect of Kipling's colonial childhood is seemingly restored to its rightful place.