India, June 14 -- 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. Rao evokes the sociocultural crucible of the Early Modern Age, when women's defiance was transmuted into deviance, and lets it ricochet into the present day. Through Esai's unease and Scheherazade's incandescent rage, Rao makes clear that the witch hunts never ended; they were merely modernised, and that is clear in the language used in the novel. At the novel's core is the relationship between Esai and Scheherazade. The latter is an artist whose dissent crackles like electricity and who uses her words as both sword and salve. Esai, in contrast, is tentative, caught between loyalty to her friend and allegiance to a college committee steeped in secrecy. Rao orchestrates their dynamic with operatic intensity. Their relationship is similar to fraught alliances of witches past, women bound by shared persecution yet undone by divisive power structures. The prose is an effective blend of the lyricism of folklore and the clipped urgency of a campus drama. Rao wields metaphors that cut through the banalities of collegiate life to reveal the skeletons underneath. The library isn't merely a repository of books; it's "where the ghosts of old ideas spar with the insurgencies of the young". Yet Rao's language occasionally buckles under its own weight. A simile like "I hauled myself down onto the ground like a feather" falters, straining for an elegance it cannot sustain. These cracks, however, are rare in an otherwise polished veneer. There seems to be a deliberate echo in Rao's work of Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, which situates the witch as a figure of economic and political resistance. Rao extends this argument to her fictional campus, where the myths of witches, real and imagined, mix with contemporary student politics. In this sense, Our Bones in Your Throat compels the readers to interrogate the stories we tell about power, femininity, and dissent. But one shouldn't mistake the folklore for the real world as it is as much a part of the novel. The novel's inter-textuality is striking too. Rao peppers the narrative with snippets of global history and regional folklore, from the Malleus Maleficarum to Tamil and Malayalam myth. If there is a flaw in Our Bones in Your Throat, it lies in its characterisation. Rao's minor characters often serve as vessels for ideas rather than fully realised individuals. Despite these shortcomings, Rao excels in constructing an atmosphere thick with tension. The woods surrounding St Margaret's are a liminal space, both sanctuary and snare. The lake, with its "breath of brine and blood", becomes a character in its own right, its depths a repository of forgotten narratives. Like the best campus novels, it leaves its characters suspended in the liminal space between rebellion and resolution. Rao's decision to eschew a tidy denouement feels apt for a story about unfinished revolutions and the ghosts of untold tales. This is a genre-bending interrogation of power, gender and the tales we inherit. Rao's witches are survivors, archivists, insurgents. They are the women who dare to question, remember, resist. In reimagining the witch, Rao might just have written a spell of a novel....