RAVISHING

A South Jersey teen and her brother have their lives changed by a wellness product that alters users’ faces.

Seventeen-year-old Kashmira Mehta can’t stand her face. Not that she’s ugly; it’s just that she looks far too much like her father, Vinod. Not only has Vinod abandoned the family—there’s herself; her older brother, Nikhil; and their mother, Ami—but he was a tyrant, so obsessed with assimilating into American culture that he refused to allow his children to learn about their Indian heritage. Kashmira was even forbidden from spending time with her best friend, Roshni, who merely wanted Kashmira to attend her kathak dance classes. But now there’s a new product on the market from a company called Evolvoir that uses nanoparticles to rearrange facial features, and Kashmira hopes it’s her answer to no longer seeing her father’s face every time she looks in a mirror. Moreover, Nikhil is an Evolvoir employee in charge of spearheading the company’s move into more aggressive uses of the face-changing technology. His goal is idealistic: He wants to get his product into the hands of “everyone who need[s] it,” especially “BIPOC clients, many of whom he is aware have less access to competent mental health services.” But as Kashmira begins using the cream and starts suffering dire physical consequences, and as Nikhil struggles to control the trajectory of the company, they must both re-examine the ethical implications of their choices. Though Surya can be heavy-handed in her messaging and heavy-footed in her prose, this debut is thoughtful in its handling of tricky themes of identity, belonging, and, perhaps most compellingly, the intersection of wellness culture and chronic illness. Surya handles this latter with unflinching—even discomfiting—clarity.

A speculative take on the all-too-real rot at the heart of the beauty and wellness industry.