Shrabani Basu is someone who visualises and sculpts time. In this era of inflatable figures and souped-up writers, it seems the array of methods at the disposal of an author looking to seduce an audience have grown rather than diminished. Far rarer, though, has become the ability to not just grasp the reader by the lapels but brush off the lint, take them by the hand, and lead them down a hallway filled with unopened doors. While Shrabani Basu may possess the spirit, it’s her raw, unselfconscious flair for the latter that’s getting her all kinds of attention.

Born and raised in Delhi, Dhaka and Kathmandu, she went to Frank Anthony School and to St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi where she studied History. After having pursued a career as a journalist in England, she took up novel writing the way most people take up needlepoint -- which is to say she fell into it, started doing it, and became entranced with all the patterns, hues, and challenges it has to offer. The fruits of her labour can be seen thus far in Curry, Spy Princess: The story of Noor Inayat Khan and Victoria and Abdul. Fresh off the morning session at the Lahore Literature Festival 2014, she talks to TNS about where she’s coming from and where she’s going. Excerpts:

The News on Sunday: How did Curry happen, and who did you have in mind vis-à-vis its audience?

Shrabani Basu: Curry was written a long time back and published in 1999. It was the result of my journalistic experience in Britain. When I went to the UK in 1987, the first thing that struck me was that every high street had an Indian restaurant. And it always had an absurd name like ‘Gurkha Tandoori’ -- when Gurkhas don’t eat tandoori -- or something that would echo the Raj days, like ‘Last Days of the Raj’, and so forth. When I went to eat there the food didn’t taste Indian at all; the menu was something I didn’t recognise. They had ‘balti’ there when in India we’d never had a dish named after a bucket! Bangladeshis serving tandoori food, which was not Bangladeshi but North Indian cuisine, ran the restaurants.

It was all very intriguing; I was very curious and wanted to find out why the Brits were so mad about curry or why is it their favourite food. "Do you cook curry?" or "Shall we go out for a curry?" would be the ultimate queries. It was always a big thing, such as the Friday Night Curry! I started writing articles about it. Finally, a publisher asked me if I would like to write a book. "Give us some titles to consider, we like your style". That’s how it happened.

Because I am an historian as well, I had to trace its roots. I was not writing about what it just is now but how it evolved going back 400 years. I went back to the 1600s to the East India Company because that’s where it all started. If East India Company was formed to look for spices, and if that’s why our entire history was rewritten starting with the peppercorn, I said: ‘Why don’t I start here’.

TNS: You are a journalist. How did you decide to turn to fiction?

SB: When we say ‘stories’ (in our journalistic lingo), we mean news articles. As a journalist I was always reporting facts. For a long time I had wanted to write a book. I wanted to write Noor Inayat Khan’s biography but I didn’t have the confidence. I’d read a little bit about Noor but I was so keen to find out more about her that I said I’d try. "But I am a journalist; I write a 1000-word piece or a 2000-word piece, at maximum. Let me be brave", I told myself. As I researched Noor’s life, it became more and more fascinating, culminating in Spy Princess: Noor Inayat Khan. It became my second book that I wrote a long time after the first one.

TNS: What exactly inspired you about Noor to write a book on her?

SB: The newspapers in Britain carried five lines in total and a photograph of Noor’s while talking about the Indian contribution in the Second World War. I was attracted to the Indian face of a pretty woman in uniform looking back at me in the photo. The lines read: "Noor Inayat Khan was a secret agent in the Second World War, and she was killed in a concentration camp at Dachau in Germany". I wondered: How did she get there? Where did she come from? My journalistic curiosity was aroused and I wanted to learn more.

Many years later I stumbled upon the file containing names of people I want to get back to. I saw Noor’s name there, and spent another three years putting together the book on her. There’s a lot of research that goes into the historical non-fiction that I produce. Usually, it starts with the library -- reading papers, digging the archives wherever the archives will have most material on people. In Noor’s case, the War Files in the National Archives were the most important resource material.

In case of Victoria and Abdul’, however, I had to start with Queen Victoria herself: the first thing I read was her letters and her diary followed by her journals. (The journals are kept in Windsor Castle in the personal royal collection, so I had to get permission from the Queen of England). It’s not a library -- just two desks. That’s how I started my research.

One thing leads to another. I had to go through the old archives and then families and their interviews. In case of Abdul Karim, I had to go to Agra because that’s where he was from but nobody knew him there. The man lived there, he died there; he had a house there given to him by the Queen yet no one knew him there. I stayed determined in the face of it all to hunt his grave down. I took help of the local journalists and we found his grave in Agra that nobody seemed to know about. Even his own family didn’t know where he was buried. A journalist will go finding graves that an historian never will!

TNS: How would you define the relationship between Victoria and Abdul?

SB: I said in one of my interviews once that Abdul was no Rasputin and Victoria no Alexandra. Abdul has always been painted very negatively in anything that’s ever been written about Victoria by the British or any other western biographer. They saw him as a manipulative Indian who got favours out of her. Since the court hated him too, everybody in the court wrote nasty things about him. But I had to see history from his point of view: How did he feel being taken from Agra and presented as a gift to the Queen? She was the one who chose him to be her teacher, the one who promoted him. That’s what made the book different.

The relationship between Victoria and Abdul was on various levels: he was a real confidant to her -- somebody she could confide in, talk to, and even weep to occasionally. She was old; her children were troublesome, and when you are the Queen, ‘it’s always lonely at the top’, as they say. Karim was somebody she could relate to. He became her companion. The Queen lived up to the age of 81. I think Abdul gave her a lease of life otherwise she may have died much earlier. (She lived a good 13 more years after she’d met Abdul Karim).

Victoria’s son Edward VII literally hated Abdul. And not just him but the entire court hated him. Her daughters hated him too for being so close to the Queen, and were ready to dethrone her. "She’s off her head about the munshi", they would say. They threatened her that if she did not stop giving him favours, they will declare her insane and her son will take over. They tried everything to bring her down but failed because Victoria stood by him steadfastly. She supported him all the way through until she was alive but as soon as she died, they threw him out.

Abdul Karim’s family lived in Agra but after Partition, it moved to Karachi. His house is like a museum full of gifts given to him by the Queen and other European royalties. He was already dead when I approached the family, but it had trunks full of belongings including his diary. Nobody had seen it for a hundred years until I opened its pages in Karachi.

TNS: What kept you engaged after the third book’s success?

SB: I have been very busy the last two years working on a project concerning the Noor Inayat Khan Memorial. The book caused a lot of interest in her life. I got a lot of letters from readers, thanking me for bringing her story to light. These were not only South Asian readers but also English readers saying: "Such a debt we owe Noor! Why don’t we have a blue plaque outside her house." (We have blue plaques, which are like signs outside particular houses to commemorate who lived there). It occurred to me that we could have one such plaque for Noor.

When I applied, permission was not granted. It made me upset to realise that she gave her life for Britain and France, and that her colleagues got plaques, but she couldn’t. With a lot of support from others, I led a campaign for a memorial dedicated to Noor Inayat Khan. It would be the first memorial ever dedicated to a South Asian woman, and the first memorial ever dedicated to a Muslim in Britain.

We received royal sanction for it. There was a fabulous ceremony covered live on every news channel in Britain in every single newspaper. Princess Anne unveiled the memorial that stands in Gordon Square. We made a huge impact.

TNS: What is your next book about. Can you let the cat out of the bag?

SB: The next book is still at a very early stage and is again history. So far I’ve been writing biographies. The next book is about a group of people -- mainly soldiers -- who went to the First World War from India (and what is now Pakistan): Punjabis, Pathans, Gurkhas and Garhwalis. It’s about how they left their villages to fight a horrific war they’d never seen before, and led us from the front. It’s a book based on their experiences because their stories are forgotten.

Everyone’s busy celebrating the First World War Centenary, and the white soldiers -- the British Tommies -- but I want to write about the turbans and trenches. I am looking for the family of Khuda Dad Khan -- the first Asian ever to get the Victoria Cross. Apparently, there is a statue of his in a museum in Rawalpindi. He belonged to Dhaab Chakwal. Mir Dast, an Afridi Pathan, was another soldier who received the Victoria Cross much later. I believe his sons and daughters are still alive, and I am looking for them.