'Why I Killed My Husband And Other Such Stories': More ambiguity, less overstating?

In Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 film, Certified Copy, a man and a woman (played by William Shimell and Juliette Binoche) meet and spend time over the duration of a day, roaming around a Tuscan town. Their interactions are confounding to the viewer: are they new acquaintances or former lovers? How much do they know about each other’s lives — what’s real in their conversation and what’s made up? Nothing is made clear during the course of the film, and even its ending is a mystery.

See it one day during a particular season, and you think, yes, these two have known and loved each other. See it a few months later when the sun is shining brightly, and the weather is warmer, and you’re not quite so sure about your previous understanding of the film.

Great fiction leaves lots of room for ambiguity — not everything needs to be tied up in a bow, and all endings need not be perfect resolutions. The role of the author, as Anton Chekhov, the master of the short story, put it, is to formulate the problem but not solve it.

So on reading Anita Nair’s new collection of short stories, Why I Killed My Husband And Other Such Stories, the reader is sure to be left with a question themselves: is the author formulating problems through her fictions here?

The short answer, in my reading at least, is: not quite. As Nair explains in her preface, the intention behind these stories is to depict the ‘state-of-the-nation’. Four of the six stories are mapped to a particular political issue that has been part of the national discourse for the past decade (and continue to be so when another tragedy strikes or another hearing denying bail comes up in the court).

The title story is a depiction of a toxic marriage where a quiet, industrious bank employee is married to a misogynistic Karnatik violinist with an inflated sense of importance and middling success in the classical music scene. It’s the best of the stories in this book. It showcases Nair’s strength as a writer with the plot mining the indignities and frustrations of educated Indian women stuck in stultifying marriages.

The story that reminded me of Certified Copy, as I read it, Twin Beds, is set in Bhutan and is also a portrait of a marriage. It starts promisingly — an Indian couple, Vasudha and Akash, arrive at a hotel in the Himalayas and are given a room with twin beds instead of a king-sized one as promised on the website. Each is secretly pleased with this situation since they loathe the sight of each other and feel safer in the lies they are telling each other rather than face the truth of their failing marriage. However, the shoehorning of a politician’s evil action throws what had been, till then, an intriguing premise of a relationship finding its anchor in falsehood, off-kilter and any emotional investment the reader had in the story of these two lonely individuals fails to pay any dividends.

The remaining four stories — the schematic state-of-the-nation ones — don’t formulate a problem. Nair has taken the issues — anti-Dalit discrimination in higher education, the attempts to strip Muslims of their citizenship through the CAA-NRC, the epidemic of sexual violence against women, and the rise of digital arrest scams — and given us stories that don’t raise any new questions in the reader about the sociopolitical health of the Republic, since we’ve already read about these incidents in media reports.

It also doesn’t help that Nair wants to shove facts and statistics in ways which don’t help the flow of these stories. In Field of Flowers — obviously inspired by the Hathras rape and murder — a conversation takes place between two characters, Balram and his brother Kanhaiya, with the latter asking: “You do know the statistics, don’t you?” to comfort his older brother. “According to the 2019 report of the National Crime Records Bureau, 32,033 rape cases were registered across the country. Do the math. That makes it an average of eight-eight cases every day. Of these, 94.2 per cent of rapes were committed by perpetrators known to the victim. Such is the state of our land.”

Do brothers talk like this? Or would it be more convincing coming from the mouth of a television anchor reading off the teleprompter?

Nair’s attempt to depict the state-of-the-nation is to be admired, but as proved by this collection, writing political fiction that compels the reader to look at the society we live in with a fresh perspective requires more than just taking a headline-grabbing issue and writing the most obvious tale around it.