Kathmandu, May 18 -- My grandmother used to tell me stories, like all grandmothers do. As a child, I would lay nestled in her lap as she told stories from the Mahabharat and the Ramayan, epics where a man armed with a boy went on to defeat evil and in the process, became a god. They were familiar tales, I would realise later, but back then, they kept me wide-eyed and listening. In her favourite sofa, worn red and frayed at the arms, she sat, a tiny woman in a faded dhoti.

Sometimes, she would read to me. In her eighth grade English, she would read out a story of three fish trying to find their friend in the ocean, over and over again. I was a child and I never got tired of it. I didn't realise then that children's books were the only Eng...