It was a New Year's Eve house party, somewhere in the years before any of this had a name.

The host kept telling the room that the party hadn't started, that some other guy was on his way, and only when he arrived would the night come alive. Akhilee Matta listened to this for long enough. When the man walked in, she pounced.

She told him, sweetly, that of course the party couldn't begin without him; they had all been waiting for the “life of the party” to arrive. She then asked where the zing was that he was supposed to bring. He bowed his head. He said he didn't know this woman. Everyone else was on the floor. By the end of it, he was no longer the one the room was waiting for — she was.

Her friend Gaurav Sethi — now her husband — was watching. He would marry her years later, and somewhere between the laughter and the moment, something clicked for him. There was a craft sitting inside the woman he would marry, and it had a name.

“She has a knack for being very witty and funny while being spontaneous,” he says, recalling the conversation that ran on quietly in their home for the next four years. “And she can do that without offending another person — instead, while making them laugh. I started telling her, “You have such a natural talent that not everyone is gifted with. So why aren't you trying it out in the industry?”

But there was no industry yet. Not one Akhilee could see from where she was sitting in Delhi NCR, holding a corporate communications job, climbing the ladder she had set herself on when she had picked Mumbai for her postgraduate course, chiefly because it was not her hometown, Jhansi.

You see, Akhilee had been a funny child. She had imitated her teachers at the dinner table, the way they rubbed the board until their feet lifted off the floor. She had given pet names to half the staff room. Her younger brother made her laugh at home; she made everyone else laugh outside it. 

But nobody in Jhansi, in those years, said the word “comic” out loud the way you would say engineer or banker. So she had filed it away as a personality trait, the way most funny women do, and gone to Mumbai to learn how to write press releases.

It took Gaurav until 2019 to find a vocabulary for what he had seen at the party. Stand-up comedy was beginning to surface in India by then. He started taking her to open mics, then to a touring show by a Mumbai comic in Delhi.

She was not impressed with herself.

“This is too polished. I can't do this,” she remembers thinking. “Premise. Setup. Punch. Premise. Setup. Punch. When you are starting, you don't know any of this.”

He sent her videos on how to construct a joke, how to build an assumption and then break it, and the laugh comes out of the gap. He emailed comics he had never met, asking if his wife could meet them and learn. One of them, Jeeveshu Ahluwalia, said yes.

Akhilee still remembers writing to him from the café where they had agreed to meet. “I've reached, wearing X colour so you can identify me.” She was a woman in her late twenties,........

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