I woke up one morning feeling angry at my face. Why should it be so round? Even if it is round, why not symmetrical? Beauty mostly has to do with symmetry. My impact on this world would have been tenfold if I were more symmetrical. People would have listened to what I said. More importantly, they would have trusted and followed what I said.

Later, the television annoyed me. I turned it on to watch Anoushka Shankar’s concert on YouTube. The traveller concert was my favourite. The fusion of Flamenco and Indian classical always amuses me. But not today. I could see the asymmetry of Anoushka’s face in the video. The poor clarity of this video did not help the situation. Her ugliness overpowered the silky music and spoiled my experience of this elegant performance. Was she talented in reality or was her success owed to her father’s name? I wondered. I had no answer to why people would pay to see this hideous creature.

I called up my fitness trainer to start my daily virtual workout. His baseball hat was tilted. I couldn’t follow any of his instructions throughout the workout. The hat made me hate him. At one point, he asked me to stop staring at the screen. That was the last straw. I was done. I sat down scratching my dirty head with my unkept nails. Since when did appearance matter to me so much? What about the inner beauty? What’s wrong with me?

Before my head exploded, I walked to the washroom. As I washed my poorly structured face with the yellowish tap water, I noticed one of my eyes turning blue. In a base of white, my Iris used to be black but not at this moment. The central Iris had turned blue in the right eye. I washed my eyes again to see if the water had blurred my vision. But slowly, I saw both eyes turning more blue, matching each other.

I always wished for blue eyes but not like this. Not overnight. Was I turning into a monster? Where have I seen similar colours before? What am I becoming right now? I had a thousand questions unanswered. In all this, my head was parallelly processing other questions like…who chose the oddly coloured tiles of this bathroom? Why is the shelf so narrow? Why is my T-shirt so creased? I couldn’t differentiate between the urgent and the trivial questions. Everything seemed important. Every question burdened and bothered me. My anxiety was hitting the roof.

As I struggled to decide whether I needed a doctor, I felt dizzy. I sat down on the bed for support. My back slumped and my hands felt limp. I slid onto the bed flat. My eyes fell this time on a wall hanging. It was a souvenir I had picked up from Himachal on my last trip. It was a wall hanging made of beads and thread. I found the answer to some of my questions. What did my eyes resemble? It resembled the evil eye. Shades of blue in a round shape three-tiered wall hanging. This made sense. This was why I could see only ugliness. I possessed the elusive Evil Eye. I did not know how to get out of it but I could sense my insides enjoying this. I saw only evil.