India, Oct. 29 -- For most storytelling parents, bedtime often comes with demands for new tales every night. Such a ritual with his daughter Tanvi, then two, led IPS officer Kiran Sivakumar to go on imagined adventures every night. Now, the improvisations have become The Father Who Ran Out of Stories, a children's book featuring Dino and Rhino, with mysteries and unusual encounters adding to their adventures together. Currently serving as Inspector General of Police (Lucknow Range) in Uttar Pradesh, Sivakumar initially began inventing the stories as familiar fairy tales such as Panchatantra and Aesop's Fables. But that didn't work. "(Children) want new stories; they don't want you to tell the same stories of Rapunzel," he adds. And so, he turned to her favourite animal for inspiration: "She liked dinosaurs as a child. But with just one dinosaur, where can we go? So I just put one more character, the rhinoceros. Dino and Rhino rhymed." The pair's adventures took them through different countries, historical events, scientific ideas and imaginary worlds. Family trips, books, films and Tanvi's questions supplied material. But some plots came from a source she was unlikely to recognise. Turning these nightly tales into a manuscript meant setting aside evenings to write alongside his police duties. His UPSC preparation and experience of essay-writing at the Police Academy offered a foundation, though returning to writing took effort. "I'm a Malayali, so I started with Malayalam movies so that she couldn't easily understand where I'm stealing from! I told her the plot, and put the protagonists as the Dino and Rhino, and then the rest followed," he quips. But when the manuscript arrived in September, Tanvi wasn't entirely pleased about sharing stories that had been hers alone. "She didn't like the fact that it was put on paper because she wanted to listen. She thought I was giving her the book and telling her to read," he laughs. For Sivakumar, the exercise goes beyond the adventures themselves: "It is not the story that is important; it is the process every parent goes through where they must improvise and use creativity to tell stories to their child that capture their imagination and make them curious," he concludes....