Anu Kandikuppa’s debut story collection, The Confines (Veliz Books, 2025) takes a grimly absurd look at marriage, reimagining love, attraction, and the social conventions that bind human beings. In stories set in India and the United States, eccentric characters struggle to express themselves—through binge eating, hypochondria, yelling at a corpse, and even through bird poop. They are desperate to connect, but also terrified of the consequences.
I was honored to talk with Anu about food, marriage, societal expectations, and how writing about the everyday lives of ordinary people can get at something much bigger.
Allison Wyss: Let’s start with the title, The Confines.
Anu Kandikuppa: I was thinking of bounds. I was thinking of constraints or borders or limits or boundaries.
AW: So what are those boundaries?
AK: I think it’s expectations. Marriage definitely features a lot. But, for instance, the second story is about family expectations. You expect your son to take care of you, to almost sacrifice their own life to do it. Also having a man with you. Once you’re in a marriage, you must stay for life. But when you’re not yet in a marriage, you’re expected to find a man.
AW: These constraints most often appear in domestic spaces—the characters are confined by their relationships and their situations. They are often ordinary people despairing that they are ordinary. Here’s a quote from the first story:
“Out of a billion possible lives, this is mine,” she said. “The Charles River will flood. Heat waves will scorch the city. The whole country will go to war. Tanks and zombies will rule the highways, but you and I will get dressed and drive to work and toot at the tanks to get out of our way and come back to our little houses and cook our little dinners and go to bed, and that is all we’ll ever do. I don’t know why I’m bothering to talk to you. You don’t do anything. You don’t run or ski or swim or go to beaches. You wear long johns. You drink ginger ale.”
AK: Priya yearns for adventure, which Srini does not comprehend or share, and it becomes a reason for their disconnect.
Regarding writing about ordinary people, perhaps it’s ordinary people who feel various social constraints and expectations more?
AW: I love that—maybe it’s why these stories feel so important. We look at small examples, but they illustrate bigger truths.
AK: I didn’t set out to write about ordinary lives. But as the stories came together, they tended to all be about people’s relationships and personal lives. Whatever happens in one’s own life, that is huge to them.
For example, I woke up today and I was feeling bored with what I had to do. That was huge to me, my boredom. Then I see a plane has crashed over the Potomac River, and that is obviously a huge event, and obviously my mind goes to that. But in the end, I’m back to what is big in my own life. What’s close to a person’s life is what matters to them at the end. If for example, you’re in a bad marriage, every day is a war.
AW: We have these bad marriages in The Confines. Many characters try to connect to each other—but in wildly misguided attempts.
AK: Yes, the stories do show people trying to connect and often failing—there aren’t many happy stories here. That people want to connect probably isn’t surprising. They want to be happy.
AW: What makes them fail?
AK: Often, they are together not by choice but by circumstances—an arranged marriage, social pressure to get married. The couples belong to a culture where marriage is for life, so when issues arise, they feel trapped, like Adi and Meenu in the triptych or Bela, who compromises in choosing a husband. They deal with their dissatisfaction in different ways. Meenu and Adi quarrel, while Bela tells herself she is in love.
Whenever I see an older couple walking hand in hand, I wonder—how do they do it? Of course, I’ve no idea if they’ve just quarreled. People are complicated, and true harmony seems hard to achieve without compromise, especially with external friction. By extension, harmony can be more easily achieved when there is no friction, when people have everything: wealth, fame, success, beauty, freedom.
AW: Even when the characters love each other, they express it in bizarre ways. I’m struck by the first story, when a husband overeats to please his wife. She doesn’t ask for it, but they seem to connect through the bodily discomfort it brings.
AK: In that story, Srini, the husband, believes he is overeating out of love, but layers complicate that belief. He’s not entirely honest with himself. His actions may stem from a reflexive reaction to her goading him about not eating. Either way, it’s a bit dysfunctional. Another layer is that his overeating isn’t what his wife wants or needs. It doesn’t help her or address her desires. So, even if Srini believes it’s love, it’s not the kind of love that will mean anything to Priya.
That raises the question: is it love if it’s done in ignorance of what the person wants? It’s like when you receive a gift that the gifter should have known you don’t care for—is it thoughtful?
AW: Srini calls his love for his wife his only vice. Is love a vice in your stories? It does seem like a destructive force, even obsessive.
AK: Srini knows that Priya doesn’t treat him well, yet he can’t let her go. So he interprets his love as a vice—he is being unusually self-aware here. Adi, too, in the triptych is a bit obsessed with his wife, which is apparent in the last story of the triptych. The same is true of the Reddys, whose love for their son causes them distress in multiple ways. They don’t take care of themselves because they wait for him to, and they are emotionally tormented by his negligence. These characters’ love brings them no joy. Maybe the reason it doesn’t is because it is not selfless. In each case, they want something from the person they profess to love.
AW: The only story in which a husband and wife speak openly is when one is dead. These stories exist in a space of failed communications and of missed chances.
AK: I did hope that theme would come across. The collection is about people talking without connecting—speaking in parallel lines, as one character puts it. I’m drawn to capture these situations because it’s like life. Isn’t it? In theory, the idea is simple: let’s talk through it. But in reality, it’s not so easy. People are bad listeners. They carry too much baggage. People defend themselves. People are not honest or self-aware. It’s sad because the intention is there—the desire to find peace and happiness.
AW: But they do seem to connect, on some level, through food. They cook to express love, to express contempt, and to create a familiar space even when they are far from their homes.
AK: You’re right, food figures often in the stories, often when a woman cooks and serves her husband, like Bela. And when a woman does not cook dinner, like Priya in the first story. When a man helps with food-making, like Bela’s husband, it’s a major event because food is seen as firmly a woman’s department. When the man decides to cook, like Neel in the last story, he is making a statement that the wife hasn’t done her job.
Food-making is a duty, and an excuse for a man to complain about a woman: This perception surely arises from my experience growing up in a society where it’s a woman’s role to provide food. In my parents’ generation in India, it is unthinkable for most men to make tea or get themselves a glass of water from the kitchen—I am not exaggerating. In most Indian houses, men never enter kitchens. Kitchens are dingy rooms in the back of the house, also because using household help is common, and there’s no point in building a nice kitchen for a maid. In modern urban households, roles are changing, and kitchens are nicer.
So, while I did not intentionally set out to give food a big role, the making of food probably works in these stories to define a woman’s place. In real life, too—I find food-making a burden. I’ve written two stories that are about cooking as a burden but are not in this collection. So it’s on my mind.
AW: Are these stories also about the confines of gender?
AK: I wasn’t thinking about that specifically. It’s just true of a woman’s life so it will come through. In retrospect, there is cooking and kitchens in all of them, inadvertently almost. It certainly is a woman’s domain in India. It is a confine, in a way, a constraint, in that women are expected to do that job.
AW: Smell comes up a lot too.
From “Please Don’t Make Me Hate You”:
When you’ve lived with someone for a long time, he ceases to be a person and becomes a presence, an aura that surrounds and permeates, a collection of odors and sounds and habits. You think about them even when you are not thinking. You know a great deal about them, and it all adds up to nothing.
From “If It Shines”:
The odors are what I think of first when I think about Raghu. A suite of them would hit me as soon as I stepped into his house: stale food and fried food, the heavy, rich smell of homemade ghee, bathroom smells, cleaning spirit smells, the musty, damp smells of Bombay. We’re paranoid about smells in our family. My son Hari, with whom I now live in California, says his house won’t sell if Indian smells settle in it, and so my daughter-in-law, a sweet girl whom my wife and I picked for him, forever airs rooms and turns on fans. Left to themselves, houses and bodies both end up smelling bad. Every morning my wife, Jayanti, and I dust our bodies with talcum powder and spray ourselves liberally with perfume. We light incense sticks and wave the fumes into every corner.
AK: At some point, while writing my stories, I did realize smells come in often, and I paused to think about it. In particular, I retained the beginning of “If It Shines” through many rounds of edits, despite the risk of seeming digressive, because I felt the odors captured the narrator’s revulsion and (morbid?) fascination towards his friend Raghu, who is so different from him.
Smell is often our first sensation when we walk into a place. Smells linger in the air and trigger memories and emotions. We all react similarly to certain smells—garbage, smells of unwashed bodies, clothes. So smells act as universal signals in my stories: a toilet smell signals disgust, incense equals comfort. I frequently spray home fragrance and light candles around my house—Indian cooking smells are strong. They do get into jackets and cars. Eating in Indian restaurants leaves your jacket smelling of the food.
Many Indian immigrants are conscious of this, or at least were—hopefully it’s changing. It’s a cliché that Indians avoid using the office microwave to warm their homemade food.
AW: Some of your characters live in India, some in America, and some move back and forth between the two. It creates a space that feels between countries and both at once.
AK: I guess just four stories don’t mention America. I’m an immigrant, having moved here thirty years ago for graduate studies. There are many statistics on our group: one has it that Indian Americans are the largest Asian-alone group, meaning those who belong to only one race. Indian Americans seem to be everywhere, though maybe I selectively notice them.
More to the point, no Indian living in India in my demographic, which is most of my characters’ demographic—urban, English-speaking, middle-class—is untouched by America. We all wanted to come here or knew someone here. We watched the movies, read the books, drank the cola, wore the jeans. In that sense, the stories must include America, even if they are not about immigration.
AW: Did I embarrass myself with that question? Is the book more about India and not the US?
AK: No, I don’t think so. Some stories are set in the US. But it’s about characters who are of Indian heritage and especially those born in India, as opposed to second-generation Indian-Americans who are born here. Then those are the constraints of where you live.
AW: I’d love to learn more about the connection between these stories. For example, we get a cluster of three stories about Adi and Meenu, from different places in their marriage. I feel like you’re doing something magical with time through this trio.
AK: I wrote the first story a while ago. Then I began a second about a married couple in the U.S. and thought it would be interesting to use the same characters. One reason was for economy—avoiding additional backstory and overlap if they were read together. Another reason was my ambition to depict the evolution of a marriage through time.
But I had too many ideas about people who were not couples to make that work. With these three stories, I hit a compromise. I set them at different stages in their stage of marriage. They are the wife’s stories, though we see the husband’s point of view sometimes. The wife (Meenu) is the one who evolves. She makes her way through a vague disappointment about her marriage to resignation. They each cover a day or a few days. I hope that what happens in between is understood from the story.
AW: Bela’s two stories go so well together that I almost missed they were separate.
AK: Consider the alternative: that the stories are presented as chapters in a novel. It creates a different expectation that they are instead presented as separate short stories with distinct titles, no? The reader expects the story to be wrapped up by the end. They anticipate the need to pause and process what they have just read. They might feel befuddled—and that’s completely okay—or ideally be struck by an insight or emotion. Either way, they pause and process rather than keep reading on like they would a novel. So the two stories deliver separate insights or impart distinct emotions.
AW: The stories don’t always take a side or give an easy answer.
AK: I leave it open a lot. In the three stories about Adi and Meenu, I’m sort of leaning toward Meenu, but Adi has a point of view as well. When you look at a relationship, unless it’s an abuse situation, there isn’t a right or wrong, so I just show the situation. A reader might relate to one or the other.
AW: These characters often get what they want but discover it’s not what they expected or doesn’t make them happy. But sometimes they are inexplicably happy with what looks miserable to others. In the Bela stories, a character finds happiness in an apartment covered in pigeon poop as the wife-then-widow of an alcoholic. These characters chafe against societal expectations but find relief in moments of strangeness.
AK: The characters are trying to conform, through marriage in many cases. Or they feel they have to dress and behave in certain ways. I guess we all bow to norms in one way or another. Given this, how happy you are depends on the person, doesn’t it? There are many Indians who are perfectly happy in an arranged marriage and plenty who are not. You could say the latter group is getting in their own way, though a more flattering take would be that they are conscious/aware of better (less limited, freer) ways of living. In “Manu and Me,” the wife Bela tells herself she is in love with her husband and happy where she is.
AW: I admire how these stories handle big, messy emotions. Most of your characters have trouble expressing their emotions, but they feel them. The reader is invited to feel them too.
“If It Shines” ends with sentence that is simple yet devastating: “I waited for my bad feelings to go away.”
AK: My preference depicting emotion is to be restrained, or approach emotion tangentially through comedy. For me, the humor provides a contrast and makes the bleakness bleaker. I like the type of restraint in the line you quoted, where I’d hope a reader understands that the narrator’s guilt will eat into him for a while until time smooths it away, as it does all emotion.
AW: Do you have hope for your characters?
AK: The characters are quite self-aware or get there in the end, and I think self-awareness and honesty are often key to happiness. They’re also resilient, which is one thing to be said for trying to live within constraints—it makes you resilient.
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Anu Kandikuppa (she/her) has worked as an engineer, a software developer, and an economics consultant. The social structures of South Indian families among which she grew up inform the stories in The Confines, her first book. Kandikuppa’s fiction and essays have appeared in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Story, and other journals. Her work has thrice received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthologies and has also been recognized by fellowships and residencies by the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and The Ragdale Foundation. In 2024, she received a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant for Creative Individuals. Kandikuppa holds a Ph.D. in Finance and an MFA in Writing from Warren Wilson College. She lives outside Boston. The Confines is Kandikuppa’s debut collection.
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Allison Wyss is the author of the short story collection, Splendid Anatomies (Veliz Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Water~Stone Review, Monkeybicycle, Split Lip, Lit Hub, and many other places. Some of her ideas about the craft of fiction can be found in a monthly column she writes for the Loft Literary Center, where she also teaches classes.