Oct 29

Oct 29 Shedding Skin by Faiza Bokhari

Originally Published in Chaleur Magazine

Shedding Skin

The waiting room smelt like a vanilla scented candle had been burning for too long. Abstract artwork hung evenly spaced across large white walls. The receptionist sat behind an oval shaped desk, the front of his thick hair coiffed into a neat wisp. When he called out Nisha’s name, others turned and stared at her. She looked like a Nisha. He said it was now her turn, so she stood, smiled, and walked down the hall.

‘Welcome back Nisha,’ Doctor Eagan waved her hand in the direction of a grey leather chair. ‘I like to meet with my patients just before they go in for surgery, just to recap and see if there’s any last-minute niggling questions that need answering. Let me pull up your file.’ Nisha sat down and shifted a little, a small squeak sounding out as her legs rubbed against the leather. She watched as a carousel of before and after images moved across a mounted television screen. Surely some of these patients were pre-teen? They looked alarmingly young. Nisha knew at thirty-three, she was above the average patient age. The clinic’s counselor had mentioned this during the mandatory pre-surgery session. He’d asked why she had only now decided to get facial enhancement surgery and she had lied, telling him she was a podcaster, who was interested in transitioning to on-screen media.

Podcasting was one of the most fulfilling parts of Nisha’s life. When she imagined her voice streaming into hundreds of thousands of ears, it gave her chills. She prided herself on having the most downloaded podcast out of everyone in the office and actually preferred the sound of her own voice when it was played back through a device. In truth, the thought of being filmed made her feel anxious. Producing a type of unease that highlighted every area of discomfort on her body. The raw blister on the back of her heel, the bra strap digging into her back and the recurring rash in the crevice of her arm, threatening to resurface. She never understood why people desired to be watched.

The counselor had proceeded to ask generic questions about friends, family and relationships. Nisha informed him there was only ever one relationship to speak of. He’s not stupid, she told herself, he knows the real reason most people undertake any major self-reinvention- is heartbreak. Countless holidays, gym memberships and image overhauls have been born from break ups. Entire Instagram accounts have been deleted and restarted afresh with a solitary photo. New hair, new me.

Until recently, Nisha had been living with her boyfriend Omar. They met two years earlier, at a small coffee shop beside the building she worked in. She sat next to him, carefully slipping into the only remaining seat on the communal bench. He sat huddled over a small spiral notebook and intermittently looked out on to the street, which was busy with morning foot traffic. Page after page, he drew caricatures with lightning speed. Each drawing showcased one distinguishing feature, the arch of a back, the furry collar of a winter coat or legs so long they looked like pipe cleaners. When he turned towards Nisha, she snapped her head downwards, her long black hair falling like a skirt around her face. A strand of hair skimmed her latte and she swore under her breath. ‘I wouldn’t draw you without asking,’ his quiet laughter cut through the panic.

Nisha noticed three distinct lines crease in the corners of his eyes as he smiled. He had strong dark eyebrows and thick spiral curls which folded neatly over the top of his ears. She didn’t want attention drawn to her features, hers didn’t blend in. She worried they wouldn’t even fit on the pages of his pocket notebook. With a Punjabi mother and Kashmiri father, she had inherited a nose that was as wide as it was long. A nose with a strong bridge, which thrusted outward as though it was preparing to flee and nostrils that spread assuredly across her cheeks, as though they’d decided to stretch out and get comfortable instead. As much as she told herself she wouldn’t be with someone who had facial enhancement surgery, she couldn’t help but be drawn to Omar.

On their first date, while drinking gin in a small bar in the city, Omar admitted he regretted his surgery as soon as they peeled the gladwrap like plaster off. A freelance illustrator without a steady income, he’d gone to Bali to get it done. The doctor was pompous and didn’t give Omar enough creative control. His original features were reduced more than he would have liked. When he looked in the mirror for the first time after the bandages were taken off, he almost went to shake hands with the foreign man before him.

In their first few weeks together, Nisha and Omar enjoyed the natural high of oxytocin surging through their systems, the by-product of a new relationship. They took turns staying at each other’s apartment, remaining awake for most of the night, yet never feeling sleepy during the day. Nisha thought Omar’s hands posed a chicken or egg problem. Had he become an artist, simply because he was born with prototypical artist’s hands? Or had they changed over time, fingers becoming longer and slenderer as he moulded clay sculptures and religiously put pen to paper. One morning, he traced his index finger gently over the angles of her face and said, ‘I love that I can look at you and see somewhere different.’

Doctor Eagan slid a sheet of paper across the desk towards Nisha, ‘Here’s a consent form relating to social media. If we can publicly post your before and after photos, you’ll receive a discount on some of the aftercare products.’ Nisha picked up a pen. When facial enhancement surgery finally became both affordable and easily accessible in Australia, the media pounced on it. There were news stories outlining how teenagers- with consent from their parents- were undergoing surgery on the weekend only to be back in the classroom by the middle of the week. At first, parents were hesitant, then mother’s reminisced about the drama of their own teenage years. Back during a time when they had laboured over using separate makeup products for blending and contouring, to form angles that weren’t god given. Micro bladed entire new eyebrow shapes and drawn lip liner well outside the parameters of their lips. Or simply used the filters on their phone, to blur out what they saw as imperfections. Why not let the younger generation enjoy the ease that came with progress?

Nisha had even recorded a mini podcast on whether the new trend of facial enhancement surgery was perpetuating a western ideal of beauty. She interviewed a pioneering surgeon, who explained the procedure was based on science and elicited a face that was highly attractive, yet racially neutral. How could something be racist, if it was neutral? He spoke ardently about how Australia was more diverse than ever and how through facial enhancement, all cultures could move forward together, collectively embracing new trends and technologies. When examples of ‘ideal faces’ were revealed, they were said to have been developed through combining the most desirable features from every race, world-wide. How close someone wanted to get to the ideal, was up to their own discretion. Inclusive, diverse and based on evolutionary psychology. Buzz-words were thrown around like confetti.

‘Do you worry people think we’re mismatched when they see us together?’ Nisha once asked Omar. People who had the surgery tended to date others who had it done too. Omar told Nisha it didn’t bother him in the slightest and a few days later they moved in together, with Omar bringing a few boxes across to her more spacious apartment. He hung his old Basquiat print up above the couch and their kitchen table quickly became full of unopened mail, pastel coloured mugs and different sized sketchpads. On weekends, when Nisha went through the mail, she occasionally flipped through the pages of one of the sketchpads and wondered how it could be that her cheeks still flushed whenever she saw her own likeness staring back.

Almost a year after they moved in together, Nisha received a message request from a woman who wasn’t in her contact list. She resisted the urge to hit delete- it didn’t feel like spam. The solitary paragraph lacked punctuation, it was a stream of sentences that merged together to form a panicked tirade. I thought you should know I really battled with telling you about this for weeks because I didn’t know how to say it without causing major problems for all of us. At first, Nisha felt as though she was reading an exert from a novel. It was the kind of narrative that hooked her in and made her pity the protagonist, questioning how they hadn’t realised all this time they were being cheated on.

Nisha clicked on the woman’s profile picture. She was sitting cross-legged on a beach towel in a cream coloured dress, her face partially obscured by soft rays of light. She looked as though she might be Italian. Nisha hurriedly scrolled back through her timeline to find pre-surgery photos. Her facial surgery was delicately subtle, enough to conform to the beauty ideal without compromising her original looks. These kind of surgeons were much more expensive. Arriving at the perfect blend was an art form.

Nisha rehearsed the stream of vitriol she planned to unleash on Omar when he came home. When he eventually walked through the front door, she confronted him before he could even pry his sneakers off. ‘Can’t you see how pitiful this is? You always said you adored me because I was different and then you go for someone that’s more of the same,’ Nisha watched as Omar just stared at the floor. She began to question whether the science behind it was true. The way these people looked, it went beyond reason, triggering something primal. She pictured the dark hair on his arms standing on end. The way he held her own face in his hands was always tender, comforting. Nisha imagined him kissing the woman with such magnetic force that their entire faces fused together.

During their relationship, there were times when Nisha caught herself observing Omar from afar. While she lounged on the couch and he stood in the kitchen, or through doorways in separate rooms. His lanky silhouette had a frail quality about it. It reminded her of a family holiday in Hong Kong when she was a child. She was being led through busy streets, when she looked up at a tall apartment building and saw a man. He was several floors high, perched outside a window on precarious looking bamboo scaffolding. There were large gaps between each piece of bamboo and Nisha asked her parents why there were no harness or ropes attached to him. He was cleaning a window from the outside. Gusts of wind blew and as Nisha pushed locks of windswept hair out of her face, she noticed the man was still casually dragging the cloth up and down the glass, making no effort to climb back in. His legs were thin, yet the bamboo seemed even thinner. Her stomach turned as she wondered which would snap first. Watching Omar made her feel like that, as though her gaze made him more fragile than he was. It was easier to picture him that way, like someone who needed her. After Omar left, it was those moments she thought of most frequently.

The night after Omar moved out, Nisha slept on the floor. Pulling the blanket off the bed she lay flat against the ground. After an entire week, she returned to the bed and the mattress seemed excessively soft. Laying in it made her feel as though she was melting away, so she resisted, contorting her body into unnatural positions to make herself uncomfortable. In the morning there would be pins and needles running across her forearm, or cramps in both her legs from curling them too tightly around one another. She began to watch foreign films without bothering to read the subtitles, before moving on to nature documentaries with monotone narrators. She learnt that when snakes shed their skin, it allows for growth and eliminates any parasites that could have attached to their old skin.

Every Sunday, Nisha went to her parents’ house for dinner. The first few weeks when she arrived alone, her parents presented her with a spread of her favourite dishes from childhood. The weekend before Nisha’s scheduled surgery, she waited until her parents were busy preparing soup. Her mother’s fingerprints were all over her tablet as she zoomed in to scrutinize the recipe. They stood behind the kitchen bench top removing items from the fridge and rinsing utensils, dodging each other with such grace it looked choreographed. Nisha popped an olive into her mouth and swiveled on a metal stool. As she pulled the pip out, she told them she was considering facial enhancement surgery, mentioning it as casually as though she was talking about buying a new winter coat.

‘Considering it? How seriously?’ Her mother sliced into a large leek. ‘You’ve come so far and haven’t felt you needed it.’

‘I think I can guess why,’ her father looked up at her. ‘It would be a shame, everyone says you are exactly like your Nani when she was your age.’

The fact her father would suggest Omar was the catalyst, incensed Nisha and her voice took on that whiny quality that made her feel like a teenager once again. ‘I know where Nani came from. What the plane trip over feels like, how many times I’ll drift off to sleep only to be woken up again because I’ve booked the aisle seat. The ridiculous musical noises the car horns make on the streets there. This is my face.’

‘It’s my Nishi’s face,’ her father began slicing a zucchini so thinly, the pieces were almost translucent.

‘Remember how when I was a kid, I had this little button nose? That changed fast. Then after high school when I gained some weight my face looked like a moon for a few years. It changes anyway and it’s all going to rot away eventually.’

Nisha’s mother pursed her lips, the way she always did when she thought Nisha was being unnecessarily dramatic.

‘Didn’t you listen to my podcast? There’s studies showing that people with neutral faces encounter less instance of discrimination. Dad, didn’t you say you found out your resume was sometimes put to the bottom of the pile? And you were born here in Melbourne! It’s no different than people choosing to give their kids names that don’t require a PhD in phonetics to pronounce them.’

‘Nisha,’ her mother’s voice was strained yet soothing ‘enough now, you sound like advertising. Just go and set the table.’

When Nisha left dinner that night, she hadn’t changed her mind. The next few days, she made a point to have lunch with the girls in the office who had undergone facial enhancement surgery. There was something that made them seem more self-assured, as though there was a lighter way of existing.

Doctor Eagan stood casually from behind her desk and smoothed down her pants. ‘Nisha, I’m satisfied we can go ahead with surgery. I have no doubt you’ll be thrilled with the results. In a moment, the nurse is going to come in and take you through to the operating theatre.’ The nurse helped Nisha climb onto the plush gurney and talked her through the anesthetic process. The entire procedure would only take two hours. She would be able to go home almost immediately after and return to work in three days’ time, at which point she should be fully healed. The timeline seemed insignificant, Nisha just wanted to go under. She felt herself getting drowsy. A warm sensation spread through her body like honey. She felt stoned. Giddy, the way it felt when you were first in love. When it reached her head, her eyes began to water. She knew they weren’t tears, she had shed enough of them to know the difference. It was just a physiological reaction. A droplet spilled out of the corner of her eye, slowly making its way down the bridge of her nose and detouring across her sloped nostril before disappearing.