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When Alyssa Vora was handed a colouring sheet in her school’s Values class, she didn’t expect the exercise to become the beginning of a book. The Grade 12 student remembers being handed a sheet with a Disney-like princess on it, along with a packet of crayons. “For the colour of the princess, everyone had used the peach-coloured crayon,” Vora recalls. The counsellor asked why no one had reached for the brown or black crayons — skin colours too. “And we said, ‘Yeah, that is interesting. Why didn’t we use it?’”

Vora tried the same experiment with her cousins. The result was the same. “That really got me thinking about how skin colours are represented in media, especially in India,” she says, “I thought that if we’re starting with kids so young, it must be something about the media that they’re exposed to that’s sort of making this happen.”

Alyssa Vora (holding book) has been conducting readings for her new book

That thought has now become The Kingdom That Lost Its Colour, a children’s book for readers aged three to eight. The book follows an Indian princess on an adventure to bring colour back to her kingdom, while carrying messages of peace, empathy, harmony, and inclusion. The book has been written by Vora and illustrated by her twin sister, Inaya Vora. At 17, the sisters have conceptualised the story, its characters, illustrations, and design themselves.

The idea of the princess may have come from a conversation about skin colour, but she says she was careful not to make the book “serious”. “We didn’t want to make this a serious book where we’re talking explicitly about skin colours and things, because honestly, young kids wouldn’t resonate with that,” she says.

Instead, the sisters built a world that looks and feels like the kind of adventure children already know. There is a princess, of course. There is also Miko the monkey, the animal sidekick because, as Vora points out, “in most of the children’s books and movies that you see, there’s always an animal sidekick”. And then there is a journey.

Alyssa Vora and Inaya Vora

“We wanted to make it a story that was like any other story out there,” she says. The difference lies in who gets to be at the centre of it. “We wanted to have the protagonist have a skin colour that wasn’t light, that was slightly brown, like many of us have. So that you could see that you can have a princess that’s brown, you can have a princess that has darker skin, and she’s just like any other princess that you read about.” That sense of recognition runs through the details too. “We’ve put in a lot of words and things that you’d find in a typical Indian household like jalebis and dupattas,” Vora says.

And then there was the matter of creating a book with a sibling. “It was definitely not all smooth sailing,” Vora laughs. There were fights and conflicts. There were parts of the story that Inaya did not agree with, or found difficult to illustrate. “So she was like, ‘Why don’t you change it a little bit?’ And I, being a writer, said, ‘No, this is my story. I don’t want to change it.’”

Eventually, the twins learned to meet in the middle. “I think we sort of learned to work together and compromise with each other a bit,” she says.

Creating the book also meant learning how the publishing world works while still juggling school. There were exams, edits, layouts and feedback to give. “It definitely was a lot of juggling,” she says. But the process has taught both sisters to manage their time and, more importantly, “just sort of enjoy the process of things”.

Then came the unfamiliar vocabulary of publishing — ISBN numbers, advanced reader copies, blurbs. Sitting in rooms with publishers made the teenagers feel “very official”, she says, “We definitely felt very grown up about it.”

For now, though, her hopes for The Kingdom That Lost Its Colour are simple. “I definitely want young kids feeling a bit more seen,” she says. She hopes children will look at the princess, the kingdom and the little details around them and think, as she puts it: “Oh yeah, this is a kid that’s just like me.”

You can grab a copy online from Amazon.