Kipling creates a harmonious picture of India that unites the secular
and the spiritual, the life of action and that of contemplation. It is
the story of the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, Kimball O'Hara, who
spends his childhood as a vagabond, traveling through India with an old
Tibetan lama, enthralled by the "roaring whirl" of the country's
colorful landscape and by the diversity of its people.