Goodreads asked Vaseem Khan:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Vaseem Khan You could say that 'The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra' was born on the first day I set foot in India. I first went there aged 23. My father was born in India but moved to Pakistan as a boy during Partition. My mother was born in Pakistan and they both came to the UK 40 years ago. I grew up hearing about India and in 1997 the company I was working for secured a contract to work with a 5-star hotel chain based in Mumbai. I remember vividly walking out from Bombay airport, into a wall of sizzling hot air, something I’d never experienced in the east end of London where I grew up. The first thing I saw was a number of lepers and beggars milling about the taxi rank. At the first traffic junction we stopped at there was a thumping on the window. I turned to see a tall well-built gentleman in a sari. My first eunuch. I turned back to the road and there, lumbering through the traffic as cool as you please was an enormous grey Indian elephant with a mahout on its back. This surreal sight stuck with me and eventually became a part of the novel I wrote when I returned to England ten years later.

flag