Every few years, my face erupts in a frenzy of eyes. The first time it happens, I am fourteen. I watch in horror as round, ripe bunches blister from my cheeks, each one clearer than the last, until all of me is sight, opened to the world like a mighty third eye. I cannot tell if this helps me see better, or if it’s the other way around, as if a latch on my face has come undone, and suddenly, so miraculously, I am seen again. People around me change, their voices now gentler, and they touch me on the shoulder in a way that is supposed to make me feel better. Their smiles are wistful. No one looks me in the eye.

My mother says I get my skin from my aunts. “They all had it,” she says, “and they gave it to you too.” She is careful to stress that it comes from my father’s side. “Something was wrong with them,” she says, and I don’t ask if something is wrong with me too, because right now, when she says this out loud, it is not about me. We don’t remember much about my father. I know he left, and I know I liked him. This is the one thing that holds us together, as if we are two distant internal organs wrapped under the same skin, our lineage pockmarked with crests and troughs.

It takes my mother by surprise when I ask for my aunts’ pictures, but she finds them anyway, buried in the trunk under a film of dust. “I don’t know why I kept them,” she says, but I am already not paying attention. I look at the pictures from every angle, and even then I cannot see what she’s talking about. In some their backs are turned, and in others they are all peeling in the places where their faces are supposed to be. In one photo, my four aunts line up in front of the homam like rows of rubber trees, their heads burning in the fire.

“You know Latha athai had to do two poojas before her marriage was fixed. The others had to do only one,” my mother chuckles, and I know the fixing was not for the marriage so much as it was for them.

“When did they do it?” I ask.

“Sixteen, probably. Of course, it was before your father and I were married. A very, very long time ago.”

My mother is perceptive, and she too knows that right now this is not about her, so she shuts the album. “Ithokkeyoru viswasamalle,” she says, smiling at me as if she has narrated something whimsical, like a children’s tale she no longer believes. “We don’t think like that anymore.” She doesn’t follow it up with any mawkish affirmation—you are beautiful, you are loved, you are strong—because this story is twenty-seven years old, and neither of us really know anymore.

That evening, on Facebook—the one place I know I will find them—I search for the evidence of our shared fate in one of my athais’ faces, but I only find a lone, protected profile picture. The more I zoom, I see the pixels of her face peeling like the photographs. It is oddly comforting, as if we are old friends meeting on a chance journey. I stare at it for hours. But then I search the names of all the cousins I have never met, and I wince when I see them in full bloom: all sixteen and luminous and public profiles, voices and skin yet uncracked, like the smooth surface of an egg.

“Adult acne can be embarrassing,” Dr. V says, holding my chart up like a poisonous snake, “but it can be managed.” She is the third dermatologist I’ve visited in the last decade, and the most expensive of the lot—a fact I corroborate with the warm lighting in her clinic, the juicy potted plants. Her skin itself is unremarkable. Clean, but hydrated. Lines that suggest a simple routine of moisturizer and sunscreen.

“When is the last time this happened?” she asks.

“Three years ago.”

She writes Acne Vulgaris Stage IV on the top right corner of the prescription, and even her delicate handwriting feels luxurious. In the remaining space, she composes variations on tretinoin and salicylic acid; The Pill, come too late for the pregnant swell of my face.

“Who did you see before this?” she asks.

“I was in a different town, back home. I only moved to the city last year, and I was told you were the best.” This seems to make her happy. I can feel her writing slow down as she savours the moment.

“I suggest some microneedling sessions. After we fix the active acne, of course,” she says, not looking up from the pad. I enjoy the legibility of the whole thing—diagnosis, course of action—a meaning outside of me for what I was becoming. But I cannot help but think of my aunts’ heads burning in the fire, the honeyed faces of my cousins as if they were cast in gold.

“Do you think there’s a genetic component to this?” I ask.

“Well, yes. Genetics have been shown to play a role.”

“My mother, uh—she suggested I do a ritual ... since this keeps happening. My aunts seem to have benefited from ...” I hesitate, wondering how to define this to a sane person of scientific temperament. “Umm, that sort of thing.”

Dr. V starts laughing, a laugh too large for her small frame, shaking her like a tree. “I wouldn’t buy into that. But a big part of this is your cortisol. So, if it makes you feel better,” she says, her wisdom now returned, “it could improve your skin.” She tears the note off her prescription pad and hands it over like a little leaf. “But don’t forget your medication. That snake oil nonsense only goes so far.”

I smile and head downstairs to pay the bill, but as soon as I exit the warm sanctuary of her room and meet the clinical whiteness of the hospital ward, I can feel myself melting: the red-hot iron of the cashier’s gaze puncturing my face, its hard, pink lumps dripping like candy.

The first six weeks are a wild and mutant spring, pus pooling in my cheeks like tree sap. “It gets worse before it gets better,” Dr. V tells me over the phone and quietly texts over the number of a therapist. This is a routine I am familiar with, but I save the number anyway, as if it could save me. A Google search reveals a petite woman in a pastel pantsuit, her arms crossed like a talk show host. Dr. V’s ambient-lighting-potted-plant friend. I decide I should just take my money and go home.

In Thodupuzha, my mother doesn’t ask why I haven’t left when Monday morning rolls along. She lets me sleep in, leaves fruit on the bedside table as I loiter on the r/SkinCareAddiction subreddit. At night, I apply my elaborate assortment of creams, but in the afterglow of the internet, they are all unappetizing: long metal tubes with names like Benzac-AC or Retino-A, stripped of any aesthetic dignity, a reminder that my skin was something to be treated, not cared for. I spend so long staring at the picture of my aunts that I slip it under my pillow like a totem.

In the dark of the night as I lay next to my mother, thumbing the old photograph, all my eyes are open, and maybe hers are too, because that is when she asks, “Shall we perform the ritual next week?”

We come upon the temple the way one finds a muscle after a long walk: suddenly pulsing and come alive, despite it being there all along. It is the kind of place a tourist would call quaint because it overlooks the assembly line of pooja bookings, the frenzy—soup kitchen-like—of workers swearing as they haul turmeric and milk up the stairs. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I visited, but I remember the smallness of my finger, and the way my father’s hand enveloped it entirely; how I walked on my toes to keep it from slipping.

“During the great forest fire,” he said, “a childless couple saved all the snakes. They applied coconut water and honey on their burnt skin and nursed them to health like their own children. They cooled the scorched earth with water. That’s why the temple is called Mannarasala. The place where they cooled the earth.”

“Did it hurt?” I asked.

“Not after they helped! The snakes became smooth and glowing. You can see them here. Some of them are robed in stone, but the others are still slithering around. Be careful not to step on them!” he said with a glint in his eyes, the way adults like to warn children of fictive dangers, entertain the whimsy of their mythical protection.

“The snakes were so happy with the couple that they blessed them with two children. A snake child and a human child. The snake child is the god here, the one our family worships. If you pray to him, he will always help you.”

That evening, we watched men combine potions of bananas and milk, honey and coconut water, turmeric and grainy rice powder. They applied it to the idols in long, lush swathes over their hoods and cold tails, until the stone was cast in thick yellow. I remember standing there for so long watching the paste dry, my finger in my father’s sweaty grip, until the entire thing folded over, the crumbly yellow mould dislodged from the stone like a snake shedding its skin.

When we arrive, the floor is already laced with colours. Around the kalam, patterns of intertwined snakes meander over every inch of the ground. I cannot help but compare it to visiting a discotheque on acid: the streaks of paint wobbling in the hot air, the mantrams so meticulously metered, beating to an invisible music. Me, in my mother’s saree, in my father’s skin.

The priests drape the idols in turmeric and vermilion, and the music begins to play, the nasal twang of pulluvan paattu ebbing and flowing in the evening light. They mark my forehead with turmeric and ask me to sit. “It’s going to be okay,” my mother says, and somehow I know it too. I grip her hand and think of my father’s. When the priests bend down to mix bananas and milk, I take comfort in watching their sacred threads swing, the ease of their movement like hammocks on a Sunday beach. I cannot tell if the music grows louder, or if I grow softer.

The pulluvathis stand away from the sacred drawings, clutching areca flowers to their chest, awaiting possession. My mother tells me they are the ones who will dance first. Like a taut string cut loose, they will tremble and shake until they fall to the ground, their hair lashing at the patterns, until I too shall be cut loose, my body unleashed from the mind like a great and torrential flood. My mother has prepared me for this. I have not eaten meat all week, so I am clean and pure, my insides scooped out to make room for god.

The priests mix the offerings with their bare hands, and the air smells of overripe fruit growing sour in the sun. I think, is this not for me too? The countless nights I’ve drenched my face in milk and honey and turmeric, the harsh grating shrills of banana peels on my tender pustules? The music swells. The pulluvathis begin to dance.

At first, their movements are slow, as if they are barely stretching their necks, but soon they begin to tremble, their bodies vibrating as if they are shaking the dust off their skin. Their long hair whooshes across the floor in hypnotic circles. I follow them with my eyes first, and then my head, and then all of me, because I feel it too. I am moving, like cotton in a gentle breeze, and then all at once, as if my head is tearing apart. My mother holds me by my arm, but I am tossing up and down, the music sieving me like husks shucked loose from the grain. I move so fast that everything takes on a prismatic quality, the priests and my mother and the pulluvathis merging into one clear image. My four aunts, their heads burning.

I can finally see their faces, bursting with eyes, the pus melting from their cheeks into puddles of gold. Next to them is my father. His head is wide and distorted like the hood of cobra.

Snake child, my father whispers, and something crusts my eyes, like tears or blood, my giant cysts coming undone, and even as the fire takes me, nothing in me is warm anymore. I shiver as if I am thrust onto a cold stretcher in the hospital ward, trembling before a surgeon I cannot see because all my eyes are slits. Something is slipping away from me. I have no eyes, no mouth, I am nothing but skin and that is leaving me too, like a long and papery will wax-stripped from my body. Something climbs out of my mouth and splits me like a forked tongue, and I am human and snake and alive again, and I am my mother, my father, and my four aunts. As I collapse to the floor, I hear the pulluvathis hissing in joy, the sound of my scales crumbling. The smooth eggs of my cousins shatter in yellow applause.

The morning shed is long and tedious, but I enjoy it, like a little piece of ritual I have brought home. I love the attention to detail, the rigour of self-care. Overnight, the pus from my skin collects into a cool, sticky residue that I peel off at the crack of dawn. When the skin comes off, what is underneath is so cold and slippery that you can see my veins, like marble. But what really takes people aback is that I have no eyes. Where the sockets used to be are two lonely slits, and sometimes I think I look like the donation box at the temple, all shiny and silver with two slots to slip a coin in.

I have found my father again; my tongue is now split in two, like it could answer to both parents. I think my friends are a little afraid of my newfound beauty. My gossamer skin that nothing in their cabinets can replicate. But I have no secret to offer them, no magic potion in a silver tube. I tell them my skin was never mine to begin with. I tell them it must be in my genes.

Editor: Kat Weaver

First Reader: Austin Dewar

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors