This country is haunted by everything— ancestors, partition, dowry deaths, gendered violence, child marriages, mother-in-laws and the worst of them all WhatsApp forwards.

When I encountered The Witches — both Dahl’s book and the 1990 film — it wasn’t nostalgia that gripped me. It was recognition. The coded femininity. The secrets. The transformations. The grotesque hidden beneath the glamour. And the very real truth that power, especially female power, always comes with a price.

Before Bollywood learned how to dream in Technicolor, before horror was reduced to latex masks and thunderclaps, there was Fatma Begum.