When a Lost Woolen Slipper Brought Back Fairy Tales

 

Princess & the Pea

Today I was helping my 11-year-old Urdu, as her second-term assessments are just around the corner. We were sitting cross-legged on the bed, books scattered everywhere, when she suddenly kicked off one of her fluffy woolen slippers. Ten minutes later she was hopping around whining, “I lost it! It’s gone forever!”

I tucked the blanket tighter around us because the December chill was sneaking in, and the moment I smoothed it down… I felt something. A small, stubborn lump. I slipped my hand under and pulled out the missing slipper with a dramatic flourish.

Her eyes went round. “Ammi, how did you even know it was there?”

I laughed, and without thinking I said, “Because once upon a time there was a princess who could feel a single pea under twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds…”

She blinked. “A pea? Like the vegetable?”

And just like that, I ended up telling her the entire story of The Princess and the Pea: the storm, the drenched girl at the castle gate, the old queen secretly sliding one tiny green pea beneath a mountain of bedding, and the next morning the princess with dark circles under her eyes saying, “I have been lying on something terribly hard; I am black and blue all over!”

When I finished, my daughter was quiet for two whole seconds (a world record). Then she asked, “So… they married her because she had bruises?”

“Pretty much,” I grinned. “That’s how they knew she was a real princess; only true royalty is that delicately sensitive.”

She thought about it, wiggled her toes inside the rescued slipper, and declared, “I think I’m a real princess too. That lump was super annoying.”

I kissed the top of her head and felt something ache sweetly in my chest. Because right then I realised she had never heard the story before. Not this one, not Puss in Boots (she vaguely remembered the ogre turning into a mouse), not the Three Little Pigs, not even Little Red Riding Hood and her clever wolf.

Her fairy-tale world is made of Baby Shark, Cocomelon rhymes, and whatever dances are trending on reels. The old Mother Goose nursery has gathered dust on some forgotten shelf, probably next to my own childhood books with yellowed pages and faded ink illustrations of girls in poke bonnets.

We are not completely outdated, us parents. We grew up waiting ten minutes for dial-up internet, saving assignments on floppy disks the size of sandwiches, burning songs onto CDs that scratched if you looked at them wrong. And now we watch our children swipe and pinch and talk to screens that fit in their palms. We bridged that whole journey, yet somehow, in the rush of upgrades and updates, a whole library of whispered bedtime tales got left behind.

I pulled her closer under the blanket that still had the faint warmth of the hidden slipper. “Tomorrow,” I promised, “we’re starting a new tradition. Every night, one old story. No phones, no tablets. Just you, me, and whatever princesses, wolves, or clever cats I can remember.”

She yawned, already half-asleep, and mumbled, “Can we do the one with the glass slipper next?”

“Cinderella? Absolutely.”

“And after that the pigs who built houses?”

“All three of them.”

She smiled, eyes closed, one small hand curled around my finger like she used to do when she was tiny. And for a moment the room felt exactly like those twenty featherbeds: soft, safe, and just sensitive enough to notice every precious little lump of love hidden inside ordinary days.

Maybe we’re not raising princesses who bruise easily. Maybe we’re raising girls who can find magic in a lost slipper under a blanket, who will one day tell their own children about a mother who could feel a woolen pea through cotton and love, and know, without a single doubt, that they too are real.

Royal in all the ways that matter