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

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).

Risky gamble

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.

Consider the first story, which gives the anthology its title. It doesn’t draw from the front page, but from familiarity closer home: a woman, educated, earning, competent, married to a man who, somehow, thinks she is his verbal punching bag. Bring on the cruel humour, the sarcastic digs, the open disregard and contempt — the sum and substance of too many women’s lives — until, one day, Anjali reaches a breaking point. 

The best part of the story for me was the quiet exuberance with which she accepts the fallout of her actions. There’s no guilt, no breast-beating, none of the conventional comeuppance that seem to be the lot of most woman protagonists when they step outside the box.

By the end of the story, though, it’s easy to see which way Nair is going with the collection, and the second title, ‘Quota Girls’, ends up being super-predictable. That is always the danger with fiction that bases itself on the ‘state of the nation’ and it applies, unfortunately, to the majority of this anthology. 

‘Field of Flowers’, set in the badlands of northern India, will immediately recall multiple tragedies, including the infamous Hathras case, and succumbs to the same pitfalls as ‘Quota Girls’, despite Nair’s brave attempt to elevate the narration with mythological parallels. 

‘The Land of Lost Content’ moves away from the wider Indian landscape into a gated community and the life of a social media influencer. But here too, the storyline is so predictable as to be boring (unless you’ve been living under a rock), further let down by the two-second turnaround.

The exceptions

The two stories that manage to beat the formula are, naturally, the ones that stand out. ‘The Little Duck Girl’ — Nair’s first “pastoral tale that turned pastoral-political” — looks to get under the skin of a middle-aged man in remote Kerala, who wonders why the citizenship protests in northern India should bother him at all. 

A little more sharpness, a little more nuance and delicacy, and it could have been an excellent study of the self-involved personhood that allows wrong to be perpetuated. 

No such complaints about ‘Twin Beds’, a surprising, open-ended story of two people stuck in a marital rut, who discover new possibilities in role-playing.

Like most anthologies, Why I Killed My Husband is a mixed bag. Takeaways will vary, but if one is really interested in figuring out why India works the way it does, better answers might be available in the brilliant reportage-based non-fiction titles that are still hitting bookstores with some regularity and address a few of Nair’s own concerns.

The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based writer and editor.

Why I Killed My Husband And Other Such Stories

Anita Nair

Context

₹599

Published – February 27, 2026 06:05 am IST