I don't eat dog meat... I am a cat person," comedian and actor Merenla Imsong quips. It is this ability that Imsong has — to laugh at herself — that helped forge a friendship between her and actor Ratnabali Bhattacharjee when they met at the set of a play in 2014. Over the years, Imsong would often reiterate to Bhattarcharjee, racist incidents she had experienced as a Naga woman in India. But almost always, she managed to convey these tales in a humorous manner. This became fodder for a short 10-minute play called Akhuni that the two worked on in the same year for Prithvi Theatre's Fringe Festival. "I had been thinking about making it into something longer.

At first, I thought I would include experiences of people from different communities. But Merenla insisted that she had enough," Bhattacharjee shares, speaking about Not Just Akhuni, an hour-long piece of documentary theatre, featuring Imsong, that will be staged at the basement of Leaping Windows, a library café in Versova that has hosted comedy and music gigs in the past, but which opened their doors to theatre for the first time on September 3 for Not Just Akhuni's first show.