Jack and the Beanstalk was the first story that I recall from my childhood and how my mother had beautifully conjured it up as a fantastical world to a wide-eyed four-year-old. It had vivid imagery that she had painted in technicolour, and had packed in every element of storytelling, complete with dialogues, descriptive forms and shapes and even voice modulations for different characters. Who needed the storybook, when you had an engaging storyteller at home? So much so that when I got my hands on a classic collection that included this story, my mother’s narration won hands down over this glossy pictorial version. I remember that storyboard till today. There were many other stories that were etched in the mind. Since I was a fussy eater, stories were used as a means to distract me during mealtimes. And while Aesop’s Fables, Amar Chitra Katha, Tinkle and Target, Asterix and Tintin came in later, my initiation into the world of stories was all thanks to those delightful narrations. Even later, realising that I had an ever-willing storyteller at home, I took full advantage of the convenience and indulged her all the time. As a voracious reader, she had built a massive library at home, and I would pick her brains each time I noticed that she had devoured a good book from the shelf; all I had to do was prod her to reveal the ‘story’. So, by the time I was in my early teens, she, after carefully curating its content to make it ‘age-appropriate’, would narrate stories one by one. This would range from horror bestsellers like The Omen, wartime titles by Leon Uris, English classics like Jane Eyre and Little Women, and sometimes, even controversial reads like The Thorn Birds. These sessions were usually reserved for Sundays, during or after lunchtime. Sometimes, it would be at teatime. Those moments were priceless, and with hindsight moulded and opened the mind up to all kinds of genres and the outside world in pre-satellite television days. It also introduced me to the craft of writing a good story.

In high school, I was lucky to have an English teacher who introduced us to diverse authors and also took our impressionable minds into far-flung universes; those of us who appreciated this necessary deviation from the syllabus soaked it all in. Often, school periods would spill over into the next, and would require some amount of diplomacy and convincing for the next teacher to sacrifice her slot, so that we could enjoy an uninterrupted 90-minute storytelling session that would put Jules Verne’s globetrotting classic to shame.