‘Why I Killed My Husband’: Anita Nair’s ‘state of the nation’ stories leave little room for subtlety

Anita Nair’s latest book, imaginatively titled Why I Killed My Husband and Other Such Stories, resurrects her 2020 audiostory by the same name and packs in five new short stories. She describes this collection of fiction as “state of the nation” stories, a phrase she has borrowed from the crime novelist Ian Rankin.

And indeed, it proves to be a succinct introduction to the stories – a map, if you will, for the readers to tell them where the path leads, and what they can expect on the journey.

The good

The book opens with the titular story, “Why I Killed My Husband.” The story’s culminating point is in the title – the reader is ready for what’s to come. Anjali, a middle-class Tamil Brahmin girl employed at a bank, is married off to the best-suited prospect. Best-suited is strictly subjective here. She has been prepped for marriage all her life and her personal achievements, likes and dislikes, and modest ambitions have been enthusiastically sidelined in the pursuit of this grand dream. A hefty dowry can in no way guarantee a happy marriage.

Anjali realises her husband, Madhavan, is a first-class bully and a good-for-nothing. A perennial artist in bloom, he quits his job to become a concert-level violinist. The collateral damages are burdening his already overworked wife and turning their son against his mother. Anjali’s quiet furies are tough to read, biting the reader’s skin like a fire ant. Madhavan’s constant whining is intolerable – I wanted to reach into the pages and land a nice slap under his ears.

This feeling of violence is delectable – Nair teases this for as long as she can in both Anjali and the reader. I felt my mood swing from despair to anger, in a steady rhythm. The drama works, it really does, and Nair is at her strongest here. But as also a crime fiction writer, Nair falls short of imagination when Anjali finally decides to kill her husband. A déjà vu moment awaits those who have recently watched Radhika Apte starrer Saali Mohabbat.

The second story, “Quota Girls,” is high on emotions. It follows two students, Uma Shree and Savitha, who have secured admission to a government medical college through caste-based reservation. The girls belong to the manual scavenging community – the untouchable of the untouchables. An education is a shot at a new life, where their caste will finally cease to matter. The girls couldn’t be more wrong. They are subjected to relentless bullying for being “quota girls” and their peers (all doctors-in-waiting) and professors are casteists par excellence. The grind of medical science is nothing compared to the abuse that the girls are subjected to every day.

“Quota Girls” could have been one of the best stories in the collection, but it suffers from a dearth of subtlety. Every sentence is so on the nose, so carefully dancing to the tones of political correctness that at one point it starts to read more like a complaint report and less like a story. The great anger that breathed life into the introductory story does not find its way here.

“The Little Duck Girl” is my favourite story in the collection. Set in a fictional Kerala town, a middle-aged bachelor lives a comfortable life of not doing anything. He is on good terms with his backstabbing siblings and only needs enough to feed himself. This is the time of the anti-CAA-NRC movements, and while Shree Raman knows about it, he couldn’t be bothered to fight it. The only event he looks forward to every year is the arrival of the “little duck girl,” a young child with Mongoloid features who wanders with the gypsies and tends to ducks. They give him free duck eggs in exchange for a small slice of land to tend to their birds.

When the little duck girl, Asha, arrives after a break of several years, she’s not so little anymore. Shree Raman’s old maid goes on leave and leaves him in Asha’s care, and tongues start to wag when she moves in with him. Her uncertain origins and the maddening fervour of citizenship complicate matters, and Shree Raman offers to marry her as the most practical way to continue their arrangement.

What works for this story is not so much its politics (again too on the nose!) but Nair’s talent in creating a loveable fool out of Shree Raman. His determined indifference to the world does not shelter him from its ugliness, and his affection for the young girl ultimately emboldens her to do what is right at the great cost of personal safety. I did not expect to grow so fond of Shree Raman and by the end of the story, I felt I could love him as one would a helpless puppy.

“Field of Flowers” takes the reader to an akhada in north India where the wrestlers josh and build their bodies with equal enthusiasm. Sportsmanship spirit, which should ideally trump all differences, is no match for class-caste politics. This is worsened by the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, which upturns the social order within the akhada and the village. A moving tale of quiet aggressions, “Field of Flowers”, however, loses its way in the middle before eventually picking up pace.

The bad

Another domestic drama unfolds in “Twin Beds.” A middle-aged couple goes to Bhutan on an anniversary trip. The hotel has only twin rooms available so something has to be done to spice things up. The husband insists on a role-playing game where the couple pretends to be strangers. The marriage is long past its romantic stage, and this seems like a good idea. As both husband and wife step into new roles, confessions, both big and small, come to the surface. “Twin Beds” was a bit of a bore and meandered more than it needed to – and perhaps it is the deliberate hiding of their true natures, I realised I didn’t really care about the post-vacation fate of their marriage.

The final story, “The Land of Lost Content”, was a real drag. Social media influencer Urvashi receives a phone call from the police pulling her up for fraudulent activities, which, among other things, includes, as the police claims, being involved in human trafficking. Anyone with a passing level of intelligence will see it coming from a mile that this is nothing but an elaborate online scam. For someone who spends much of her time on the internet and makes money off it, it is ludicrous that Urvashi is wholly unaware of such fraudulence.

If the unbelievability of her ordeal is not annoying enough, the story proves to be even more redundant when it passingly acknowledges Umar Khalid languishing in jail or GN Saibaba dying in prison. The flippant mention of state-sponsored hounding in a story of a witless person getting scammed is offensive. I lost interest at this point but ploughed on till the end. For all its shortcomings, the ending to the story is quite inventive and could have come at least thirty pages before, without causing any real harm to the narrative.

Why I Killed My Husband and Other Stories is a choppy collection at best. Two seriously good stories banded together with four forgettable ones. What the stories seem to be missing is a coherent link – the “state of the nation” idea does not emerge organically; Nair is hyper aware of the making of her stories and overt references to real politics snub out all nuances that the reader might prefer to discover on their own. I dislike it when an author hands out a manual on how to read their work, and Nair does that in the very first sentence of her Preface. This is not to say that I do not like Nair. I studied her fiction at university and have delighted in her literary novels ever since; however, much to my chagrin and sadness, Why I Killed My Husband and Other Stories is simply not the Nair I know and admire.

Why I Killed My Husband and Other Such Stories, Anita Nair, Westland.