Dear Skin
"Skin, I know this game. I hurt you. You felt pain. So you hurt yourself some more. Now you feel shame." I write a letter of friendship to my skin.
Singed, stretched, soft, mottled, spotted, tight, blemished, smooth: Skin, you show up in different ways at different places, like a map across my body, with a story at every curve, secrets in hidden parts, and bare truths on my face, neck, and arms that have gone without sunblock for years.
I have let the sun and dust mess with you. I am sorry I did not protect you. You are the cover I took for granted; the shield I have worn, without a care.
But Raani, the maalishwaali was different. Your pigment patches on my back and legs bothered her so much that she made two large bowls of ubtan to rub and scrub and free you of your dead parts. Turmeric, besan, dahi, masoor: the mix looked like a pakora batter, except Raani marinated you and me in it, instead of potato and onion rings.
It was a hot afternoon. I was irritable. The stench of the batter was unbearable. The wait for the ubtan to dry stretched like a long road with no shade. I couldn’t bear to have Raani knead, pummel, and rough you up with her heavy hands.
So Skin, I slipped to the loo, on the pretext of doing susu, and turned on the shower to wash away the scrub. Little blobs of the thick yellow paste clogged the bathroom drain, ending all chances of restoring and renewing your glow.
Rani was livid. She stomped off. I never called her back.
Those days I didn’t care. But you did.
Skin, you hated that that I did not see you. You protested by raging riots and leading mutinies on my body.
1994. 2000. 2016. 2023.
Those were the most hostile years of our relationship. You unleashed hives on me, and rose as big little welts everywhere, burning, throbbing, transforming my stomach, back, chest, neck, limbs, and face into something of the lunarscape.
Craters, mountains, and valleys of crimson rashes stretched from my head to toe, as you danced in rebellion on me.
I shut you down with killer meds. You returned with the revenge of eczema and double-decker allergies to the food I ate, the liquor I drank, and the dust I breathed.
Skin, I know this game; this spiral of harm. I hurt you. You felt pained. So you hurt yourself some more. Now you feel shame.
I wrapped you in soft organic cotton outfits. I bought linen and fabrics of bamboo and hemp. My outfits were handspun, and naturally – dyed, for air to flow, so you could cool.
These purchases blew a hole in my pocket, as did the meds and the visits to the skin specialists. But I won't be cheap here and pull out the account book of our relationship.
Skin, no one liked looking at you in your years of rage. Family, friends, and doctors pinched their eyes, creased their foreheads, and turned their heads away when I revealed your aggressions on me. Colleagues baulked at the landscapes on your surface. Clients twitched at the smallest glimpse of your mottled patch.
But those were also tender years of our friendship. I would stare at you for hours, run my fingers along the contours of your welts, caress you with medicated lotions, and wash you with waters of Neem. We would shed tears together at how far you had gone, just to be seen.
My doctors suggested other ways of shutting down your rage. Hard, steroid injections, the oily intravenous ones that needed thick needles for effective, targeted delivery. Two shots in a week, for six weeks.
I hated the intervention, the violence. But we needed to temper you down before we could walk on the pathways of truce.
Skin, you are calm these days. I am learning to read you in different ways. Your meltdowns are no longer about the urgent need to be seen. They are acts of love, rising from the desire to protect.
Your rashes are an early warning signal that my gut is stockpiling firearms of anxiety. When you burn, you are telling me that I am hovering close to a heat headache. When you clear up, I know I have done well with sleep. And when you glow in the golden hour on the edge of a mountain, you are showing me a future beyond the binds of the city I love.
These days your lines on my face remind me of my mother. You puff up in the mornings and swell into sweet little bags under my eyes. You fall like her sari pleats on my forehead. You feel dry under the lips and sit little Gulab Jamuns around my cheeks.
You have inherited all her dangerous traits. Like retaining water and fat on my face- the most seen, and public part of my being.
But skin, don’t make me look too much like my mother. The lines on her forehead have been cut deep by hardships. The hollow around her cheeks has been chiseled by loss. Her skin sags from weights, I do not wish to bear.
These days I am taking great care of you. I pat a few drops of saffron face oil, one pump of vitamin C serum, a few dots of a moisturizer, and a bit of SPF 40 sunscreen, on you every day. I drink half a tablespoon of a plant-based collage boost powder on days I remember. This is the most I have invested in our friendship.
Skin, in return I ask that you hold me up well. Because as the years pass, I want you to be my most comfortable place: in joy, solitude, rage and grief.
‘Here lies M. She was the most comfortable in her skin.’ That would be a good end, both for you and me.
I wrote this essay in response to the prompt: An Impossible Friendship, at the
Workshop - a space for discovering and writing stories that pulse in the interstices of our lives.
I read it in a rush cos I wanted to read that you made peace with your skin eventually and was I glad to read the end. Exquisite writing and more wings to your imagination as you respond so so wildly to a prompt as direct as an impossible friendship. And now I must wash my face and use the night cream. If only every mundane task had such evocative reminders
The perspective you bring to your writing is amazing Manisha! Looking at skin as a friend or foe, in sickness and in health. I had a sudden urge to look in the mirror after reading your essay - have I been good to my skin? Stellar writing.