My dad is an excellent story teller, who can just spin stories so creatively. Late at nights, he used to tell me sweet fairy-tales or even stories involving super-heroes as protagonists.

When he first told me the story of Cindrella, the princess, I so much believed that she really existed and was my dad's neighbor in his village. He told me about her sitting and weeping in a corner of her house and would turn back to look at my reaction, and of course, I would have a sad, long face empathizing with the weeping princess. The next moment when the fairy godmother appears before her, my eyes would light up in anticipation of something good happening to Cinderella.

One factor, where my dad differed from all others in story telling was, he used to involve me in each and every action happening. Fairy tales had to have a wicked witch and I didn't know how a witch looked then. I remember him, once drawing a picture of a witch with very long, sharp teeth, dirty grin, untidy hair, dressed up in rags and till date she is my witch, in any story. And after this narration, he would ask me what I would do if I encountered a witch some day? I would promptly reply that I would just cut my long hair and give it to her as goldilocks did :P (or was that Rapunzel?)

We decided to try our hands on making the pumpkin chariot, but amma cooked it before that:(. Never mind. So I thought I'll at least get the glass sandals which she had, but I was made to believe that glass sandals would break if I wore them and they are exquisite products available only in the fairy land.

Fairy tales always had this cute ending, where they live happily ever after :P. But I would become so sad, as the story comes to an end.

My granny was also pretty good in telling me mythological stories about gods and goddesses. Not to mention, only the demons in those stories interested me:D Stories involving super-heroes weren't very interesting, as the same story looked much better on television with all the animation. So ironically, I would sleep mid-way between these super-hero stories. And that was used as a trump-card to make me sleep, when he was not interested.