How do you tell a story to a child? For actor-parents Kunal Kemmu and Soha Ali Khan, it took a bit of practice, and some nudging from their four-and-a-half-year-old daughter Inaaya. “She loves being read to, and enjoys looking at picture and storybooks,” says Kemmu, adding, “But, I realised that when reading out to her, I’d miss seeing how engaged she was with the story, because she’d be sitting on my lap and staring at the book. I wanted to look at her face while I narrated to her. So, I started creating stories from my imagination; it helped me understand how she reacts or what scares her.” The process of creating soon turned into a game of sorts, where little Inaaya would tell her dad about the characters she wanted to hear about, while he would weave tales around them. During one such occasion, Kemmu told her the story about a little girl, and an orphaned puppy, and how they met to become best friends. This was when the germ of the idea for Inni & Bobo Find Each Other (Puffins Books), their just-released illustrated book, took root.

We are chatting with the couple over a Zoom call. Jumbo Jr, the flying baby elephant with long ears from the 1941 Walt Disney fantasy film Dumbo, is splayed across Khan’s oversized tee. We haven’t been to the couple’s Khar residence, but from what we can see on our screens—a broad shelf stacked with encyclopedias, fiction and non-fiction, titles not clearly captured by the camera on their iPad—books are as central to their universe as the movies. This is not the first book coming out of their stable—Khan previously authored The Perils of Being Moderately Famous (2017), a rather, witty choice for a title of a memoir—but it’s their first as a couple. “Writing a children’s book is much shorter,” Khan quips. “It took me about eight months to write my first book. This one took us just three hours. But of course, the process of putting it together took longer, because finding an illustrator who could bring to life what we had imagined, was a much complex task. But I really enjoyed it.” Telling a story “using simple language, and characters and words that are exciting to children”, says Khan was important. “It was fun, but I don’t know how the critics are going to be… these three-year-olds. They are much more honest.”