A visual reference always came before an idea or script, for Swati Pandey. Seated in her office at Fort's magnificent Indo-Saracenic style General Post Office (GPO) building, the Postmaster General, Mumbai Region, recalls two specific instances that led her to take a shot at storytelling. Pandey's father was a refugee who fled East Pakistan in 1949, while her mother hailed from Orissa.

"He brought with him nothing except a lot of stories. My mother, on the other hand, hadn't experienced such strife. There was a clash of cultures in the world I grew up in," she says. And so, most of her stories stem from imagination, when she creates pictures of how her grandparents must've survived the freedom struggle.