Putting on a new face

In the mirror, she sees the specter of her father, Vinod, animated in her face. Reflected at her, in her, are his heavy-lidded eyes, his crooked nose, his squarish jawline. That face that contorted in fury whenever she did the smallest thing wrong. That face that went scarily blank after he yelled himself hoarse. That face that never loved her enough and doesn’t love her now.”

Imagine being so emotionally scarred by your father that you want to change your face.

Ravishing, by Eshani Surya, sounded like sci-fi when I first read the inside flap – a beauty product that changes one’s face without surgery. Not my cup of tea, but “an incisive portrait of a predatory industry” and a story of desi – Indian American – siblings sounded different.

School is out for the summer and seventeen-year old Kashmira wants to become someone new. The first step is to go to a South Asian party in the suburbs near Jersey City. After hiding out for over a year, traumatized by her parents’ divorce, her father, Vinod, not ever coming back, it’s time to get drunk, have sex, be what her dad wanted, which is, to not be ‘Indian.’ Her mother, Ami, never really ‘there’ as a parent, is still in denial, still wondering if Vinod would like how she arranged the flowers. Kashmira’s older brother, Nikhil, checks in with Ami often from New York City, trying to fix everything that’s broken. A box their father has left behind becomes a flash point between Kashmira and Nikhil. She’s blocked Nikhil because of that box. Kashmira told Nikhil that Ami wants them to open it together. Nikhil thought this was a good idea but Kashmira said she wants nothing to do with the box, it can sit in the closet forever. Nikhil lost his temper at that, just like their father. He ordered Kashmira to just do it, “Don’t argue.” For Nikhil, this was their chance to be free – he wants Kashmira and Ami to move on. For Kashmira, moving on isn’t as simple as opening a box; she told Nikhil he doesn’t understand, she’s the one who has to see their father in her face, everywhere, every day.

When Nikhil gets a job with Evolvoir, a wellness start-up, maker of NuLook, he thinks he can fix Kashmira – the cream can finally erase Vinod from her face.

The company’s core product, NuLook, comes as a cream comprised of revolutionary nanoparticles that can each be programmed to recognize and make specific changes in specific cells on an accelerated timeline. As the nanoparticles are absorbed into the face, they travel cell by cell–even into the eyes–until they encounter the correct area where they can affect bone and tissue growth, melanin levels, and more.”

I don’t know what it says about Ravishing, or me, that, more than the story line, I was fascinated by this application of nanotechnology. So much so, I reached out to a nanoscientist friend before getting back to the book. Plausible but concerning, we thought, given the nefarious scenarios if such a cream was marketed.

Back at that party, Kashmira re-connects with Roshni, a childhood Indian friend. Kashmira notices Roshni looks beautiful now, “impossibly perfect” but, then her face seems to melt. Roshni’s dark skin and ugly features (per Roshni’s mother) are back. When Roshni shows Kashmira the cream that makes her beautiful, Kashmira has to try it.

At first, Kashmira thinks nothing will happen, but then suddenly something twists so hard that she bites the inside of her cheek and reaches…to wipe the product off…and then, yes, a new face takes the place of her old one…Vinod is nowhere to be found in it.”

Roshni gets Kashmira an Evolvoir account so her personalized cream can be developed using Kashmira’s genetic data and desired facial changes. At first, Kashmira is deemed ineligible for the cream – company policy does not allow completely changing one’s face. When news leaks to the public (by Nikhil, who doesn’t know Kashmira is a potential customer) that Evolvoir is denying the cream to some new users, management, not wanting to put second-round funding at risk, allows “extreme facial shifting.” Kashmira receives her cream, Nikhil is given a more visible role in marketing the product.

With her new face, Kashmira is having a great summer. More “brown kid” pool parties, sex with the most popular desi guy around and doing Indian things with Roshni that Vinod had banned. Each time Kashmira applies the cream there is “the deep tearing sensation” under her skin accompanied by nausea and video-like images of the day her father left. It’s just anxiety, Kashmira tells herself. After some weeks, Kashmira is suffering from near-constant nausea, crippling stomach cramps and bloody diarrhea.

The second half of Ravishing focuses on Kashmira’s deteriorating heath and the fall-out at Evolvoir when the media and investors start asking about the cream’s “side effects.”

Ravishing is a decent read, but nothing jumped out. The book was like the teenage angst ones I read in junior high school, which is fine, it’s just not what I expected. There was not much new about the beauty products industry and the corporate ‘intrigue’ was predictable. Even the “technical” explanation for the extreme physical reactions in Kashmira’s body, caused by the cream’s nanoparticles, was, well, kind of basic: “people with painful and traumatic family situations” and “already having a cellular reaction to toxic stress in their lives” were more vulnerable to “issues in the digestive system.”

Surya’s biography says she is “a chronically ill South Asian writer.” Kashmira’s fears and anxieties when hospitalized come across as very real, perhaps drawn from Surya’s own experience. The build-up to Kashmira’s health crisis felt repetitive, though, the many, many instances (read, the many trips to bathrooms). It’s pretty obvious what is happening after the first couple of bouts.

The book is in four parts, which puzzled me – the story covers about three months and is set in two locations, not too far apart (instead of spanning generations and continents). I didn’t notice a major shift between the parts either.

The chapters focus on Kashmira or Nikhil, in turns, but, thankfully, this didn’t leave me dizzy. Also, almost every chapter in Ravishing is set up by a prelude of sorts: the script of an Evolvoir ad, a news article about the cream, an internal company email, musings by a user as her mental and physical health worsen. This really worked for me, moving the story along more effectively than additional narrative and dialogues.

The main characters are well-drawn by Surya. There’s Sachin, Kashmira’s friend/neighbor/crush, who communicates more comfortably through his journal and camera – he’s making a movie on the life of South Asians in suburbia. Roshni, Kashmira’s confidante, with her own family issues, is likable, a bit stronger than Kashmira. There is also Yukiko, a young Japanese-American social media influencer who is grieving the death of her sister. Changing to her sister’s face lets Yukiko believe her sister is still alive. I’m not convinced her character was necessary, but since Yukiko appears throughout the book, it seems appropriate to mention her.

What didn’t work for me in Ravishing?I wanted to know more about Vinod, from him. He was a monster per Kashmira; per Nikhil, Vinod had his reasons – Vinod grew up in New Jersey in the midst of ‘dot-buster’ racial violence and then saw the hate directed at brown people after 9/11. To survive was to blend in, to reject everything Indian.

The Vinod chapter could replace the high-school-ish romance parts – Kashmira and Sachin finally getting together and way too many pages devoted to Nikhil’s flirtation and dates with Michael, a colleague at Evolvoir.

There also might have been more about using face-shifting in lieu of therapy and/or to erase one’s ethnicity. As one Evolvoir investor says when the company seems reluctant to allow extreme changes:

But some users are using this product as a means to re-evaluate their relationships to their family-slash-ancestry, their identity, and their individual futures.”

Extreme facial shifting, the next level, when skin-whitening creams aren’t enough?

The main characters of Ravishing, the desi teenagers, are the grandchildren of Indian immigrants settled in the US. I was a few chapters into the book when this hit me – I’m so used to South Asian fiction written by or about Indian immigrants in the US, and the next generation, American born/raised desis. There may be more such books, maybe even on my bookshelves, waiting to be read, but I think this was a first for me. Two generations of immigrant angst, and now, a third. Sigh.

Aside from feeling old, I realized there aren’t many teenage or adult grandchildren of Indian immigrants in my life, despite my parents, their siblings and their friends being settled in the US for more than 50, even 60, years. So many stories to come. I hope they won’t be more of the same.

Ravishing has the psychologically abusive desi dad, the invisible Indian mom and the American-raised child, Vinod, who’s excessively allergic to all-things Indian. Kashmira’s aching to watch Bollywood movies, eat Indian food and go to temples didn’t quite gel – it was as if she was channeling her immigrant grandparents. Nikhil called the above, generational trauma. Which reminded me of something I was told decades ago, when I said it’s not me, it’s my dual-culture upbringing: