“Papa, one more”. “No, no, it is time to sleep.” “Yes but just one more. Pleeeease.” “Ok a short one then.” “Yeeeees yes yes yes yes..”.

And so my father began again. “Ek dafa kya hua…” the hindi words for “Once upon a time”, the words that put me to sleep from when I was a tiny toddler until the age of 8 or 9 I think.

I was a peculiar child. I didn’t care for gifts or toys or clothes or sweets or anything of the sort. What I wanted most was stories – hearing them, reading them, and later watching them in the form of movies. I hadn’t the slightest idea then that one day I will be writing them.

My father’s stories almost always came from religious texts. The ancient religion of Hinduism has no shortage of stories; the longest text in the world called Mahabharata comes from India; it is literally 5 times the length of the bible and the Iliad and the odyssey combined! It has 2,20,000 verses and about 1.8 million words. The other major Hindu text called Ramayana is about 4 times the length of the Bible. And those are just two of the numerous collections of stories. Five thousand years of the Indian journey is choc-a-block full of Creation myths , Devotional stories, Heroic tales, Divine adventures, Moral tales, Animal fables, Parables, you name it. Stories that finish in 5 minutes and stories that take 5 months to narrate. What was remarkable about my father was that he didn’t read these stories from a book, he narrated them from memory. His stories always had a male protagonist – after all most old stories had heroes not heroines. He would tell me gender doesn’t matter, any one with intelligence, courage and ambition could become a hero – even girls! 😉

My next story-teller was equally impressive. Didi; my elder sister was 5 and a half years older. But even with our wide age gap, people used to call us two peas in a pod. Our names were always taken together Aradhana-Swati, Swati-Aradhana. As a child, I followed Didi everywhere like a puppy and she – she didn’t mind that one bit. Instead she pampered me, watched over me and taught me things. I was her doll – when our mother went out to run errands, she would dress me up in our mom’s saris that she neatly folded back before mom got back home. I don’t think our mom ever found out! I was also Didi’s audience – for she too was a storyteller, except she didn’t narrate stories that she had read or heard, instead she crafted them herself. From the time I was a pre-teen to my early teen years, every night Didi would tell me a story that she spun – just like that – on the spot – from her imagination – her intricate yarn running long, months long, with its twists and turns and surprises. And her stories always had a female protagonist; a girl with the intelligence to chart a life & career of her own, courage to reject the status quo of her society and the ambition to fly to a foreign land called America. At the time I thought she was telling me these stories to teach me I can be the hero-ine of my own life, it was only when I grew up I realized she was teaching herself.

My mom didn’t tell me stories. She was living inside her own tragic fairytale; her heart nursing wounds that took her life in an untimely manner. When she passed away, and our father brought home our step-mother, my sister and I entered another fairytale. Didi & I charted lives & careers of our own, rejected the status quo of our society and flew to a foreign land called America. It was like being a hero-ine in one of Didi’s stories, or a hero in one of Papa’s.

Years passed and I became a filmmaker. Now I tell stories professionally. Although I try to live an examined life, it was only about 3 years ago when I realized how deep in my roots does storytelling go, that my storytelling is part of an inter-generational journey that continues and that my existence & identity is shaped by the stories that once lulled me to sleep and later taught me to dream. My father’s tales taught me that heroes are made, not born; my sister’s stories taught me that the heroine’s journey begins with believing in yourself. Even my mother’s silence was a story—a reminder of resilience and the chapters left unwritten.

And so as a filmmaker and storyteller, I carry their legacy forward, spinning yarns that may someday inspire another to dream beyond her – or his – horizons. Stories are more than entertainment; they are a map, a mirror, a thread. Like Ariadne’s thread, they can help us navigate the labyrinths of our lives, slay the minotaur within, and find our way back home. We are the stuff of stories.
So as I make time to write stories, my own story-time, I hear the echoes of my father saying ‘Ek dafa kya hua’ and the whispered dreams of a girl who learned she could be the hero – I mean heroine – of her own unique story.

Swati Srivastava is an immigrant and a multi award-winning writer, director, and voiceover artist. A filmmaker & storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. She is also the Director of Visual Media for a national non-profit and an environmentalist. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com