How do you feel when someone calls you Chhyake every day?
What is Chhyake, you ask? It’s the scar left by skin diseases. That’s the literal meaning. But for me, it’s a word my mum uses to describe freckles—hers and mine. A word that’s always sounded like an insult. I’ve heard it so many times in my life that now, I don’t even get offended. I don’t get angry. I don’t feel insecure. I think I’ve just given up on her. I know I can’t convince her to see it differently.
I even told her that people fake freckles now. That in today’s world, they’re considered beautiful. She didn’t believe me.
I’ve started to like my freckles. But telling her that feels pointless. Just like telling her I’m queer feels pointless.
I did ask her once—what would you do if I fell in love with a woman and decided to get married? She got angry and told me not to joke like that. At the time, even my short hair was already a big deal.
But now, I don’t blame her. I blame the patriarchal society that shaped her ideas of beauty, worth, and gender. Her perception was shaped by her mother, and mine by hers. These insecurities have been passed down like heirlooms. But I’ve decided: it ends with me.
I’m going to tell my children that they’re beautiful the way they are. However they identify. Whatever they look like.
Still, I’m scared. I’ve internalized a lot of this. What if one day, without realizing it, I call my future daughter—or cat, or son—Chhyake too? I say this because I don’t even flinch now when my mum says it to me. I don’t feel the need to correct her. Just like our society doesn’t feel the need to correct how it polices gender.
Chhyake (2024-25)
Chhyake is an ongoing body of work that interrogates the cultural mechanisms through which shame is inherited and identities are silenced. What seems like a small story—about freckles, about a mother’s words—unfolds into a complex exploration of gender, queerness, body image, and intergenerational inheritance. Through intimate storytelling, this work challenges how beauty is defined, how identity is erased, and how silence is passed down.
Interweaving memory, maternal tension, and societal critique, Chhyake reveals how bodies—especially those read as female—are subjected to correction, categorization, and contradiction. Yet, within this tension, there is softness: a desire to rewrite what has been internalized, and to choose a different inheritance.
Chhyake is for anyone who has ever felt unseen in their own skin.