Few contemporary writers capture the quiet violences of everyday life as sharply as Anita Nair. In her latest short story collection, Why I Killed My Husband and Other Such Stories (Westland Books, `599), she turns her gaze to women who endure, ‘adjust’ and sometimes rebel, not always loudly, but with a resolve shaped by years of being unseen. Across six stories set against the backdrop of a deeply fractured social and political landscape, Nair examines how power operates within homes, relationships and institutions, in ways so normalised that they escape notice.
The book’s striking title hints at something explosive, but what unfolds is far more unsettling: a series of intimate reckonings where silence is as potent as rage and survival itself becomes a form of resistance. In a conversation about the making of the collection, the high-profile supporter of the UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency) reflects on the nature of endurance, the cost of looking away and why the personal and political can never truly be separated.
Excerpts
The title immediately catches attention, but the stories unfold very quietly. What drew you to the contrast?
The title Why I Killed My Husband suggested itself even before I had finished writing the title story. So, when I decided to compile the collection, I wanted to use the same title for the book. I thought it had a certain appeal that would excite a reader. Given that the stories themselves are built around core contexts about the state of our nation, which most of us think don’t concern us or our lives, I needed a title that, while being strong, was intensely personal. Let us say that I was seeking the iron fist in the velvet glove effect.
Many women in the collection seem to carry on rather than push back openly. What do you think about endurance in their lives? Are there particular experiences or observations that inspired these characters’ struggles?
As Indian women, we seem to have endurance imprinted in our DNA. Those who resist in bold, dramatic fashion are few and they exist in a stratum most women can’t see themselves ever reaching. Instead, the women I write about carve out their self-worth through smaller but no less important struggles. A middle-aged woman seeking actual me-space, a young girl deciding to join a political protest, a wife stepping out of her skin to be someone else – these themes represent the changing nature of the Indian woman and our country, and because these shifts don’t seem dramatic on the surface, they are often overlooked.
In Why I Killed My Husband, the narrator’s actions are shocking yet told with a calm, almost matter-of-fact voice. How did you approach capturing her mindset so readers could understand her, even if they don’t agree with her choices?
I don’t particularly like shrill rage. In the story, the narrator is a woman whose life, like that of many women everywhere is one of constant repression. Her dreams have no place unless they serve the greater good of the family and everything she says or does is judged. She has reached the end of her tether, yet society offers her neither a safe space nor a breathing space. So, she decides to do something about it. Once I was able to identify who she is as a person, I wanted to project her cold rage – not revenge but rage – best served cold.
Twin Beds shows characters’ coexistence rather than connect. Is coexistence sometimes more damaging than conflict?
We often shy away from connection or conflict, telling ourselves that passive avoidance is safer than confrontation. Yet this passive stance leads to an impasse. In a larger context, many of us also choose to look the other way regarding what plagues our society, thinking it won’t arrive at our doorsteps, until it does.
Silence plays a key role in the book. Sometimes what isn’t said feels as powerful as what is. Was that something you were consciously exploring?
I have great faith in my readers and their ability to read the varied textures of silence. I wanted readers to arrive at perspectives of their own volition rather than having everything stated up-front. So I’ve woven silence into the fabric of these stories just as deliberately as words.
The Land of Lost Content is rooted in your own experience. How did you decide what to keep personal and what could become fiction? Did writing change the way you look at the events now?
Pretty much everything about the story is based on my own very unsettling experience. I just brought in Urvashi, a character from my earlier book Eating Wasps, as the protagonist. When I mentioned what had happened to me to a few friends, one or two of them asked me if I didn’t see any red flags. While writing the story, I realised there were no obvious red flags. Every step is carefully orchestrated to an already written script that I was blindsided, as are all the people who have had this happen to them. It’s not about the intelligence or awareness levels of the victims; but about the layer of fear that shrouds each one of us, that the system is an abyss you can drown in. And there is no tussling with it without consequences. It is this belief that the perpetrators of this particular crime use as their primary tool.
In stories like Quota Girls, social pressure comes as much from peers as from systems. Were you interested in showing how oppression can be internalised?
The caste system is alive and thriving in India to this day. So when a person comes into this world with a ghastly inheritance of being oppressed through generations, and their own lives is striated with acts of oppression, it becomes ingrained into their psyche that they are not worthy. The same goes for oppressors too who believe they have a divine right to privilege. They are merely carrying forward their legacy and sense of entitlement. I wanted to talk about this contrast and how it would require great courage to break free of that internal voice.
Were there any stories in this collection that started one way and ended up completely differently than you initially planned?
I began writing The Little Duck Girl as a pastoral tale and a few paras down, it transformed into a political-pastoral tale. Once I found the tenor of the story, it set the tone for the other stories. I plot my stories in a broad way before I begin writing them, so detours take place in the telling rather than the structure itself.