Crimes of the nation | Review of Why I Killed My Husband And Other Such Stories by Anita Nair

Explore Anita Nair's anthology, "Why I Killed My Husband," reflecting on India's socio-political challenges through crime fiction.

While discussing the dearth of original crime fiction in India a while ago, a writer friend pointed out that it was a hard challenge to take on the city crime pages of newspapers. From domestic dramas like the body of a past lover hacked and stuffed into a freezer, to be revealed only after a prolonged power cut, to murder at scale as in the Nithari case, urban India, sadly enough, is hard to beat when it comes to violent crime. 

Of late, though, that thread of truth being stranger than fiction seems to have escaped the inside pages and emerged onto the headlines. As ancient fractures are consciously widened, dampened fires re-lit and fresh awareness questions the status quo, the country experiences a churn with few precedents.

It is this churn that prolific author Anita Nair seeks to capture in her new anthology, Why I Killed My Husband and Other Such Stories. In her preface, Nair attributes her inspiration to crime novelist Ian Rankin’s use of the phrase “the state of the nation” in an interview. She writes, “While I had always found crime fiction a great platform for social commentary, I had just stumbled on a new way of seeing the world around us.” First released as a series of audio plays, her stories — reworked and expanded — now find new life in these longish short stories (novellas no longer being in fashion).

Though it might seem like a stretch to describe this collection as ‘state of the nation stories’, Nair isn’t the first to use the genre platform for social commentary and won’t be the last. The device works to serve up a fine cross-section of current concerns in India, including misogyny, casteism, religious division and social apathy. 

Even at its most basic, fiction allows deep dives beyond the hot takes on Reels, giving space to the author to flesh out characters, colour in motivations and intentions, expound on the consequences and outcomes, and thereby perhaps answer the reader’s (or the general public’s) perennial question: why do bad things happen?

Author Anita Nair | Photo Credit: Murali Kumar K.