Essay: Stories and I-My Story by Nidhi Srivastava Asthana

In this personal essay, Nidhi Srivastava Asthana shares the journey of discovering a new world through stories and books, as a child to being a mother to a child.

There really would have been no stories – to listen to or to tell – if I had drowned when I was four. My transparent, golden, and very slippery bar of Pears Soap slipped into the water, and I followed it. My father, who had already swum across half the breadth of the swift-flowing river by then, had been the only one to actually want to enter the waters. The rest of us were content to paddle near the banks. The slippery soap … my mother’s screams … my father’s swim back in record time: and I had sufficient material for personal stories of a pathetic, melodramatic, and unhealthy sort that played out in my mind in my early teens every time I felt sorry for myself and resentful that I seemed to be nobody’s favourite. They usually began with ‘If I had drowned …,’ and equally unimaginatively ended with ‘And then they would know!’