The first time Shrabani Basu heard of Abdul Karim, she was carrying out research for a book about the history of curry in the late 1990s. A few years later, while on holiday with her family, she came across a painting of Karim in Osborne House, a former private home of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on the U.K.’s Isle of Wight. Basu was immediately struck by the fact that Karim — whom she thought was a servant — had been painted “beautifully, in red and gold,” with a book in his hand. “I knew that Abdul Karim had come from India to England to serve Queen Victoria in 1887, but the portraits told me he’d been painted as a noble man,” Basu tells TIME during a meeting at her literary agent’s office in London in early September.