Vaseem Khan > Quotes

“The only way to avoid falling prey to the perils of confusion is to never be confused about what you are. If you are an honest man, as I hope you will prove to be, never allow the circumstances of a moment to make you act against your nature. That way lies the ruin of everything you stand for.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra

“In his younger days, he had believed in the concept of certainty. It had been a chastening experience to feel the sand being sucked from under the shoes of that belief. The human condition was truly inscrutable, he now knew, the sewage wallowing at the bottom of a man's soul dark and turgid.”
― Vaseem Khan, Murder at the Grand Raj Palace

“You do well, my son, to cry like a woman, for what you could not defend as a man.” ”
― Vaseem Khan, Midnight at Malabar House

“If the police were any more useless they’d be politicians.”
― Vaseem Khan, Midnight at Malabar House

“The trouble with most Westerners was that they lived a rarefied life in India, cossetted by wealth, enthralled by the snake-charmer-and-swami "mystique" of the subcontinent. It was the rare foreigner who got their hands dirty in the slums, the poverty, the myriad other malaises that plagued the country.”
― Vaseem Khan, Murder at the Grand Raj Palace

“But the human mind has an infinite capacity to delude itself. And in that gap between reason and superstition, all manner of fantasies prevailed.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown

“experience. Indians often seemed hellbent on punishing those of their countrymen who”
― Vaseem Khan, The Edge of Darkness

“A lingering hangover from the colonial era might have dulled her political senses, but India was now awake, seven millennia of tradition and history reasserting itself.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Lost Man of Bombay

“Independence had brought freedom to the country, but with it had come opportunists settling into the vacuum left by the departing British.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Lost Man of Bombay

“I'm no fool, I know Gideon wasn't blessed with the brains God gave geese.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Girl In Cell A

“Hatred is the most malleable force in the world, my friend.”
― Vaseem Khan, Last Victim of the Monsoon Express: A Baby Ganesh Agency novella

“We all know what happened,’ she said. ‘The trouble is that a new fiction is being written. Day by day we are rewriting the past.”
― Vaseem Khan, Midnight at Malabar House

“The shadow of Partition still lay over the country, the communal violence unleashed during those terrible years, lingering in the memory like a dark dream. If a fractious peace reigned, it was merely the embodiment of Nehru’s will; sporadic bouts of violence continued to shatter the notional unity.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Lost Man of Bombay

“We Americans love to self-mythologise. The defenders of democracy and the free world. But we have our own problems and we tend to take them with us wherever we go.”
― Vaseem Khan, Death of a Lesser God

“Our struggle to rid ourselves of the British has convinced the average citizen that any authority might be overturned, by the simple expedient of disobedience. The one authority to which this rule doesn’t seem to apply is one none of us can see or touch or hear, at least not directly.’ She looked at him blankly. ‘God, Persis.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Lost Man of Bombay

“affliction of nostalgia”
― Vaseem Khan, The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown

“Death. A ringing note in the silence. A creature whose appetite could never be satisfied. What was man in the face of such a beast? What was left when the beast had devoured the soul? A handful of memories and the illuminated pointillism of a life”
― Vaseem Khan, The Edge of Darkness

“He had long ago decided that organised religion was the number one cause of divisiveness in his great country. He considered himself a devout secularist; he treated all religions with equal respect and personal indifference.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra

“If the Premier No.1 garage was the”
― Vaseem Khan, Inspector Chopra and the Million-Dollar Motor Car: A Baby Ganesh Agency short story

“And the careless disregard with which her fellow citizens – men, in particular – vacated their bodily effluent, liberally spraying walls and floors as if they were avant-garde artists of the type she sometimes saw in discarded magazines . . . A night shift in hell might have seemed paradise by comparison.”
― Vaseem Khan, Death of a Lesser God

“Like a limping horse, he’d been put out to pasture until it was time to send him onwards to the glue factory where he might be shot and put to some use.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Dying Day

“Gulliver’s Travels: ‘We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
― Vaseem Khan, Death of a Lesser God

“She felt as out of place in this environment as a crow at a convention of peacocks”
― Vaseem Khan, Death of a Lesser God

“The British may have left, but the energies her countrymen had once directed towards revolution were now engaged in endless complaint. The country, many said, had gone to the dogs.”
― Vaseem Khan, Death of a Lesser God

“By the way, is it a boy or a girl?’ Bahadur opened his mouth to speak and then realised that he did not know the answer. ‘One minute, sahib.’ Without further ado, he scrambled onto the ground, lifted the elephant’s tail and attempted to ascertain the creature’s sex. ‘It is a boy, sahib.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra

“Ganesha: a riddle inside an enigma wrapped inside an elephant.

Often, when he looked into Ganesha’s gentle brown eyes, he would think he saw his Uncle Bansi staring back at him.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown

“It occurred to me that it must be a natural thing to be treated as second-class citizens in another country. But to be relegated to the status of inferior in one's own home ... ? That, I'm afraid, is something many Indians can neither forget nor forgive.”
― Vaseem Khan

“It seemed not to occur to her detractors that their objections were at odds with the ideals of the new India. Hadn’t women fought the same fight, shed the same blood? Why should they be denied the right to participate in Nehru’s bright new dawn?”
― Vaseem Khan, The Lost Man of Bombay

“Money couldn’t buy you happiness, or so the saying went; though, if you didn’t have it, you were certain it could. But those that did have it weren’t always the happiest people in the world. You only had to watch the news to know that.”
― Vaseem Khan, The Perfect Crime

“In my world, there is no room for instinct. Science is about facts. Empirical evidence. A good criminalist does not rely on intuition. Nine times out of ten that little feeling in the gut is incipient diarrhoea, not some mythical flash of deductive genius.”
― Vaseem Khan, Midnight at Malabar House