By Sean Sullivan

“Mom, my friends know you’re online,” her daughter reported recently.

Sheena Melwani’s cover had been blown. Sort of.

The Natick mother of two had been building a massive online following for more than a year, largely unbeknownst to residents local and regional. 

Staying sotto voce locally while ascending to social media stardom wasn’t so much a conscious effort, but rather a symptom of the strange ways an online presence can morph and manifest. That one can garner millions of fans and followers via the internet, while only a handful of hometown people know about it, may also somewhat signify our lack of lines of local connectedness.

But Melwani sees the secret of her online success as a symptom of what’s scarce in the social-mediaverse. Her videos fill a void in that sphere, wholesome and honest humor as antidote to the doom-scrolling so many us were were doing in those early weeks of the pandemic and months leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

 

“What is happening to the world, and what can we do?” Melwani remembers thinking of those tumultuous months of 2020. 

She is an accomplished singer and began performing live on her Facebook page, hoping to lighten listener’s spirits during those darker days. She would take requests during those ses sions she performed at her home, garnering a modest following. But it was experimentation and improvisation that led to the legions of Melwani’s online followers.

 

In the process of recording a video she intended to post to Instagram, an off-screen heckler began to chime in. The interloper interrupted Melwani’s vocals at various intervals, taking humorous swipes at the lyrics of the track she was covering. The disembodied voice was determined to derail her recording session, and succeeded - in more ways than one.

That mystery voice from the “audience” belonged to Melwani’s husband, who it seemed had had enough of overly-saccharine songwriting. The unplanned commentary provoked bouts of laughter from Melwani, and prompted the prankster to ratchet up his rhetoric. It was all caught on film, authentic and funny enough that the couple decided to post the sabotaged singing session online.

The impromptu act caught on. The growing popularity and response to that video led the two to start their “Interrupted” series, a volume of videos where Melwani’s soulful and serious singing is punctuated by the critical-comical commentary of her off-screen spouse.

“It’s a little glimpse of what you get in our house,” she said.

Since the videos began to go viral, Melwani has distributed them among her social-media platforms, sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. Her TikTok channel in particular has been a boon for attracting fans. A platform that specializes in short videos, that site has traditionally been a favorite of the younger crowd. There, Melwani has amassed a following more than 8-million strong and counting.              

She began posting her short videos on TikTok during the first few months of the pandemic, her way of reaching out and socializing with a world sequestered in uncertain times. 

The interrupted vocals videos soon morphed into Melwani being amiably ambushed by her spouse while she went about the everyday minutiae of life. Working at her laptop or piano, applying makeup, doing laundry or simply sitting and relaxing, sipping a beverage - all these moments and more were fair game for a covert campaign of comic spousal criticism.

It’s these videos that have lured legions of fans to Melwani’s social-media channels. A subset of these skits is her husband’s “Dad Jokes,” a gag in which he descends upon Melwani, minding her own business, to deliver a short, pun-punctuated sentence. Or two. Or three. He seems equipped with an endless supply of these - one-liners corny and clever enough that you have to laugh in spite of yourself, against your better judgment.

What, for instance, do you call a pile of cats? A “meowtain,” of course. Melwani replied to that one with modest and patronizing laughter, rating the joke a 4 out of 10. Not to be outdone, she has taken to retaliating, sending her spouse into the kitchen to answer his phone, only to discover the caller was Melwani herself, summoning him to retrieve for her a bag of chips.

When Melwani’s husband does appear on camera, he is disguised, his face obscured by a computer-generated, cartoonish bobble head. Sensing his expressions, the software animates the avatar in sync with his speech and facial movements. This has generated much online gossip, many questions and theories about his identity, but the couple has repurposed that phenomenon into a challenge. The “Real Indian Dad,” as he’s come to be known online, will be “unmasked” only when the couple’s Youtube channel reaches 1 million subscribers.             

As the act of interrupting each other for a joke or prank became their main claim to fame online, the videos were lent authenticity due to the fact they aren’t scripted. The jokes are fresh, the interactions unrehearsed, which in a sense lets viewers participate, offering them a window into the Melwani household and family life.  

“It just became like our thing,” she said. “If it feels forced, then we don’t put it up.”

Speaking of windows, closing them is one of The Real Indian Dad’s favorite and most famous expressions. He can often be heard demanding that they “close the windows,” on a particular topic or situation. The metaphor is close cousin to “shutting the door” on an idea, theme, discussion, etc, and closing the windows has been adopted as a favorite phrase of the Melwani fanbase.

So while the world works and hopes to close the windows on the pandemic and this decade’s turbulent beginning, more and more fans will undoubtedly continue to open their laptops and social-media feeds to the content the Melwanis produce.     

“I think that people really enjoy disconnecting from the chaos,” she said. “That’s what I feel is drawing people in. They’re all on this journey with me.”