Of unfinished revolutions and untold stories

The witch, historically, is a figure burdened with accusations and moral judgment. She has been scapegoated for calamities and reduced to a trope, the trope of a spectral effigy of patriarchal anxiety.

- Pranavi Sharma

The witch, historically, is a figure burdened with accusations and moral judgment. She has been scapegoated for calamities and reduced to a trope, the trope of a spectral effigy of patriarchal anxiety. Megha Rao's Our Bones in Your Throat conjures this spectrality and gives it form and fury within the confines of St Margaret's College.

This campus, with its cryptic woods and architecture, is where Esai and Scheherazade, friends-turned-rivals, recast the witch as metaphor. Esai, the novel's protagonist, is the girl-next-door grappling with the extraordinary. When she learns of the haunting tale of Minaxi, a water spirit tethered to the college's forbidden lake, she stumbles into a historical continuum of betrayal and resistance. The figure of Minaxi, half folkloric, half allegorical, is Rao's reclamation of witches as archivists of oppression whose stories are sedimented in time only waiting for someone to unearth them.

But Our Bones in Your Throat is not only a story about witches. It is also a story about the enduring architectures of power. Rao takes the reader to the Salem witch trials by way of St Margaret's campus politics. Both milieus share an eerie synchronicity: the same paranoia, the same weaponised whispers.