‘Our Bones in Your Throat’: A savage campus novel that takes the culture of bullying head-on

It has happened. Women’s rage has broken out of the debilitating stereotype of hysteria and claimed space on the frontlines of both discourse and literature. Adrienne Rich said it politely: “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. / The beak that grips her, she becomes.” Sylvia Plath was more on the nose with her “Beware/ Beware/ Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air.” Elisabeth Moss streamed it to our screens in her iconic portrayal of an incandescently angry June Osborne in the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Arundhati Roy, making no bones about her/her protagonist’s anger, has often tempered rage with hope. Kamala Das’s poetry has been scathing in her condemnation of internalised patterns of patriarchy. Exploding with a slow-burning rage now, is Megha Rao’s voice, unforgiving, unwilling to compromise:

Serves you right, now you’ve got stuck
our bones in your throat.
Swallow all you want –
we refuse to go down.
Our bones in your throat.

Rao’s just-released novel Our Bones in Your Throat, is a savage re-working of the campus novel, taking head on the culture of bullying that permeates academia, wearing its politics on its sleeve, using anger as a catalyst to effect change, asking accountability for not just the obvious aggressors but also the institutions that protect them.

The world of St Margaret

The world of campus novels often tends to be hermetically sealed. Not this one. The scene of its unfolding is St Margaret’s, a prestigious liberal arts and science college in Bombay (not referred to as Mumbai in the text, despite its obviously current timeline). Larger than life, with its sprawling campus, stately buildings, a plush library, fancy cafeterias, and state-of-the-art facilities, St Margaret holds many secrets, amongst which is a forbidden lake with its eerie legend of a woman drowned. Slick, posh, and inordinately proud of all the “traditions” that set it apart from the ordinary, the college is a fascinating facsimile of the new private Indian university as also those pedigreed institutions with century-old histories, looking down their noses at the hoi polloi. The accuracy of the mimesis will be evident to every reader who has ever set foot in these premier/hallowed institutions.

It is also a world driven by power. The Dalvi family that owns the college has both political clout and muscle power. It is no surprise then that bullying, sexual abuse, and casual racism, all worm their way into the lives of those who find themselves at the bottom of this power hierarchy. The triumph of Our Bones in Your Throat lies in its organic sequencing of oppression and resistance, of the necessary tension and the shift in the dynamic between the abuser and the abused that spills over from the college campus into a world that has grown receptive to protest, especially by the young, and subsequent, often violent, change.

The story winds itself around Esai and Scheher. Orphaned in early childhood, Esai lives a middle-class life with her aunt, uncle, and cousin, in a surprisingly well-adjusted family unit. Scheher, in contrast, lives in a lonely, if well-appointed home, with Banksy prints, an eclectic collection of books, and tasteful art, sponsored by her absent father. Esai is an outlier who refuses to toe the line, fuelled by what she calls “fool’s courage”, the spark that makes her do outrageous – right – things at the cost of her safety. Scheher, when she first appears in the story, is an aspiring performance poet, caught in an abusive relationship with Joshua D’Silva, heir to a business empire, and misogynistic in the way only those with unlimited power and privilege can be.

Scheher, a diminutive of Scheherazade, the teller of tales, has refashioned herself from the ordinary identity of Firoza, taking a name that identifies her, by way of a homophone, with the city. Esai and Scheher, in the tradition of the most enduring of friendships, find their solidarity in resistance – personal and political. Palimpsested within their stories are those of other women – the Student Union chairperson and daughter of the principal, Ira Saanvi, working-class teenager, Jewel, aspirational and punished for her naivete with abuse by a teacher, and Minaxi, the shadowy woman of the lake who haunts Esai, appearing in her dreams, enticing her into the lake, revealing the past, pushing Esai into a radical future. The women of Our Bones in Your Throat are flagbearers of feminism for a new generation. They stand in protest, stand their ground and are resolutely implacable adversaries to hegemonic structures.

Bringing urban legends to life

Rao’s prose is a thing of beauty, all sharp-edged and polished to perfection. The city comes alive in images and snatches of poetry. Flaneuses in the city, Esai and Scheher turn into that hitherto mythical construct – the woman at leisure. They walk the streets, go to cafes, people-watch, read poetry, admire the murals at Bandra, ride in taxis, drink at bars, set up cosy domesticity, and take care of each other. The effect is strong with this one and Rao’s ability with language takes the reader from the realistic to the surreal, weaving through dreams and nightmares. Memory, that treacherous and nuanced tool for reconstructed narratives, handholds the reader through grief, love, trauma, and discomfort. There are tears and tirades and collective emotional responses.

Esai’s could-have-been boyfriend, Bagchi, summarises the effect of it all succinctly when he asks, “Women going public about their trauma has always made people uncomfortable, hasn’t it?” The women in the novel recognise their trauma, speak of it, freely, and choose, radically, their own peace over everything else. They fall in love and fall out of it and take back their power from patriarchy and from partners who fail them. Scheher’s “outrageously confessional poetry” also serves the same purpose. It condemns and it excoriates and is the perfect showcase for the anger of women who will not be silenced.

The book opens with a potent commentary on rumours. “You could tempt the world with a sensual secret,” it says. “All it took was Henry’s calculated lies to behead Anne Boleyn. Word of mouth that turned teenage girls into Salem witches. A single grapevine that led to the boiling of Jahanara’s lover.” Rumours are heady and turn public opinion. In this brave new world, rumours also shift the balance of power, bringing urban legends to life, tilting status quo into change.

Minaxi’s story snakes its way into the narrative as a rumour and soon becomes its very core. There is power in the spoken word, Rao seems to say. The novel weaves in a multitude of stories – that of the original Scheherazade, spinning stories to save her life, stories of women from Esai’s Tamil heritage, of women who turn into guardian spirits and ghosts, of warrior goddesses, and heroines from literature. Telling stories becomes an act of truth-telling, in the spoken poetry Scheher performs, and the visions Esai has of the past. There is also the crucial question of what this power of the word can be harnessed towards. Despite the originary goal of righting wrongs, words, once spoken, acquire a life of their own, slipping out of the grip of those who brought them into being. People love theatrics, Esai says. “They love drama, they love things that are hard to believe.” People, the large, indeterminate masses, the readers of this book, are complicit in the drama, are architects of both trauma and redemption.

With much skill, and in the enticing siren song of her prose, Megha Rao draws us all into complex questions of ethics and justice. Art seems to be, for the writer, as much as it is for her heroine, a way of “daring the world to get fiercely vulnerable” with her. Our Bones in Your Throat is the sort of story that draws you in and makes you confront long-dormant demons. It is also likely to make you rage. At the least, it will help you see why young women on college campuses, in the streets, in public places, and inside homes, are embracing their collective anger. Its time has come.

Our Bones in Your Throat, Megha Rao, Simon and Schuster India.