A mosquito sits on the surface of the skin, inserts its syringe through layers of skin and draws out blood. Satiated, it flies away, leaving an itchy trace, a painful bump. Your mother will tell you not to scratch, that scratching makes it worse, that scratching will leave a mark. She does not tell you that scratching brings an exquisite pleasure. Moan silently if you dare to scratch, in your mind. Scratch the itch never letting on how good it feels.

Because the round bubble of irritation that forms won’t keep its perfect sphere for long, Scratch long enough and the mound will unearth the liquid red underneath. Like a biosphere of unbidden earth finally contaminated by the world outside, the bite will shift its shape, bisected by the pressure of the nail, by the pleasure of halving itself.

The wholeness begins to decay, leaving behind derivations of what once was. They are remainders barely recognizable, overlapping in a Venn diagram with what they were before. Covering and subsuming all other entities, swallowing them up within its curves. Once inside, it is difficult to find a way out. Within an orb so full, so perfect, there is no flat line to draw a door, to cut out a human-sized rectangle and hang the sign EXIT over it.

That is why we return to the nail again, to that point of pressure, which so pleasurably severs the circle, transferring fluids from one side to another, bringing forth that ecstatic Ah.

AdityaPande traces the patterns of the body. His circles, abstracted and piled upon one another, are a jaggedregister of bodily parts. Bodily and yet so far a distance from anthropomorphic. Instead, the diagram expands and contracts, searching for radical beginnings and endings.

Radix: to the root.

Circling round and round, he fills the void within the space, patting it down tightly, violently, with compulsive repetition. Walling himself within, is the hole half full or half empty?

The body is a map of imperfect circles. An iris in an almond, flecked with light. A breast, and at its center,an areola, plotted on the skin like a stamp of pigment. Like a cork soaked in wine and dabbed on a white cotton napkin. The nipple when seen from across a room can be nothing more than a circle placed within a circle, yet walking closer in a straight line, never taking your eye off your object, will reveal that the surface is irregular and discolored. There is no perfect seam to its rim. Instead it meanders back and forth, creating an uneven perimeter. Like the white of an egg, dropped into a hot pan. The edge runs ever so slightly, bubbling up in parts.

Once you are so close that the edge begins to run, the nipple is suddenly something different. It is a landscape, full of ridges and puckering textures, a bump and an errant hair. Reminiscent of the earth, full of mountains and valleys.

Look closer still, so that lashes brush skin, into its center. With telescopic magnitude, a vast expanse unfolds. Planets circle one another, aligned by their gravitational pulls. Heavenly bodies create rings of desire around each other, never to touch and never to look away, as BrionyFer suggests, in “an elaborate sex game of the inanimate.”

A word to the wise: be careful of where you insert that nail, or where you bisect that circle, for as good as it feels, chances are you may never be able to find that perfect shape again.

Avni Doshi is a writer, curator and critic.