It started with a question 🪔

I'm the mum of two — a four-and-a-half-year-old who asks about ten questions before breakfast, and a one-year-old who is currently discovering that everything on a shelf belongs on the floor. This is why this site exists.

The question I couldn't answer well

One evening my elder daughter asked me why we light little lamps, and why we say some words before we eat, and who that monkey god is on the poster at the shop. Not one question — the whole flood of them, the way a four-and-a-half-year-old does it, standing in the kitchen, not letting me cook.

I knew the stories. I'd grown up with them. But I found myself stumbling: half-remembering a name, mixing up which story belonged to which festival, cutting a tale short because the real version has parts you can't tell a small child. I had the answers somewhere — I just couldn't reach them at 7pm with two children and dinner going.

How I grew up

I was born into a very religiously inclined family. The stories of the gods didn't come to me from a book or a class — they came from my grandparents, my parents, the grown-ups around me, told out loud, again and again, at odd hours and on ordinary days. Nobody sat me down to "teach" me anything. I simply grew up inside the stories, the way you grow up inside a language.

That's the part I wanted for my own children. Not the ritual on its own — the feeling of it. The sense that these stories were always around, and that someone loved telling them.

Living abroad, I realised I'm not one source of these stories among many. I'm the only one.

The part nobody tells you about parenting abroad

When you raise children in another country, culture doesn't arrive by itself. At home it's one grandparent's visit a year. Outside, the nursery doesn't know the songs, the shop doesn't have the books, and the only place a child meets these stories is the phone or tablet you hand over when you're exhausted.

So the culture quietly moves from "things we live" to "things we explain" — and explaining is hard work that mostly happens on weekends, after everyone is tired. I watched that happening to us and it genuinely worried me. Not because I wanted my daughter to be religious, but because I didn't want her to grow up feeling that her stories were something she had to be told about, instead of something she grew up in.

And then there's the guilt of the screen. Every diaspora parent knows it: the device is the babysitter, the translator, the teacher, the bedtime story. I didn't want to fight it — I wanted to give it something worth watching.

What I decided to build

I looked for what already existed. Most of it was good, but nothing fitted a real family: the long versions were too long, the app versions had adverts, the Hindi-first ones didn't work for a child who thinks in English, and hardly anything covered the Sikh, Jain and Buddhist traditions our own children sit beside in school.

So I built the thing I was looking for. Short stories a small child can follow. Festival stories that explain why we celebrate, not just what to do. Shlokas and chalisas with the pronunciation split up and a real Indian voice to sing along to. A bedtime mode with a lullaby and a soft read-aloud voice for the nights when I can't read myself. Games, because a five-year-old learns by playing. A printable book, so the story can live on the shelf and not in a screen. And a parent dashboard, so I can choose what my children see and actually see what they've been reading.

It's honest about where it comes from too: the festival stories are gentle retellings that follow the traditional texts, and each one names its source. They're simplified for little ones — which is exactly why we always suggest reading along with your child rather than pressing play and walking away.

What I ask of parents

Read with them, not at them. You don't need to know the stories — that's the point of this. Start with five free stories and a festival, and see whether your child asks for one again. If it works for your family, tell one other family who's been looking for exactly this. That's genuinely how a small site like this grows.

And if something's wrong, or a story from your own home is missing, write to us. I read everything.

Written by the mum of two behind Once Upon a God · divinedofact@gmail.com