When I came to college I was determined to not to be an English major. I had heard the horror stories about unemployed English majors with college loans and crumbling dreams. Who was I to think that I could write for a living and did I even want to? English is my second language and who would want to read the stories of a girl from Nepal? So I took classes in Calculus, Economics, Sociology, and--just to shake things up a bit at my liberal arts college--even one in Collage Making. I thought that I was safe. English couldn’t tempt me into loving it even though I read a novel a week and stuffed my pockets with scraps of hastily scribbled prose. Then my Collage Making professor announced that we’d be writing two non-fiction essays for class and bam man down. I was rubbish at making collages, but the essays danced and glided from my heart to my fingers, doing little somersaults along the way. The next semester I took an Introduction to Creative Writing class, just one more, still resolved not to surrender to English. Now, a year later, I read three novels a week. I read one novel for each of the three English classes that I have this semester.

But maybe this started long before that fatal collage class. Maybe it began when I was seven, back when my father would tell me stories before bedtime. He was the best storyteller in the world and I was a fearless explorer/dragon tamer/magician. Every night I fell asleep with his words filling my head with fantastic stories of giants and wildebeests. I started writing my first story then, feet dangling above the ground at the bulky gray family PC, painstakingly searching for the letters with my index finger while frustrated that the keyboard wasn’t alphabetical.

Or, maybe, it started far before that, when my father was twenty-three and decided to switch from Pre-Med to English in the middle of his MA, much to the dismay of his father who wanted him to become a doctor. Or, perhaps, it was even earlier, when he was a young boy in rural Nepal in a classroom with a leaky ceiling, where the students sat on jute sack mats and moved around to avoid the dribble of rain. His teacher taught him English over the thunk of raindrops falling into a steel bucket with a steel ruler used to rap misbehaving knees. My father bought Enid Blyton and C. S. Lewis paperbacks and, later, P. G. Wodehouse and Dickens. He was a village boy who spoke in Nepali but dreamt in English. Decades later I will comb through his books to inherit the dreams lying between the faded covers, mesmerized by the smell of English on yellowing paper; the smell of magic.