Apart from her time doing household work, Sarla dedicatedly searches for stories to tell her many grandchildren. She looks out for folk tales and reads up on the different renditions of it. Then she writes her script using the different versions of the story and her own improvisations and records the stories. On Tuesdays, she sends a Hindi story and on Fridays, she sends one in English.

Sarla’s stories don’t have any sound effects. “It’s just a grandmother telling a story to her children,” Sarla states simply. “It has to be personal,” she says.

When Sarla records a story, she does it in one sitting, without breaks, edits or cuts and on her phone. It’s informal, intimate in nature – almost as if a grandmother was telling the story right in front of them.

Once Kahaniwali Nani started, it grew immensely popular, mostly through word of mouth from her first subscribers. “One time, I got around 800 subscription requests in a day from Mumbai,” Sarla tells. Now, she has subscribers from all over the country.