Some books tell a story; others let you enjoy the telling. Shivani Sibal’s Moms belongs to the second category. Radhika Khanna, a privileged Delhi housewife married to Manik, a controlling, successful and powerful lawyer, is the pivot of its before-and-after narrative. She has a luxurious home, money, designer clothes and all the outward trappings of an enviable life. Around her is a trifecta of school moms—Naina, Parul and Tara. Yet beneath the privilege lies a marriage governed by Manik’s chillingly bureaucratic handwritten list of “crime and punishment” rules, and after Radhika’s death, the consequences continue to ripple through their lives. Sibal’s prose has a wonderfully dry, knowing intelligence making absurdity the performance: Radhika’s morning ritual involves Instagram, coordinated gym clothes and washing her hair in a sink because the remodelled bathroom lacks a salon-style shampoo station. Tara offering to help Manik “separate the wheat from the crap” leaves him wondering whether he likes women who speak that way after all: “For now, at least. Maybe.” That tiny “Maybe” does the work of a paragraph. Elsewhere, the daughter’s room has “Lilliputian furniture”, while the Khannas’ wealth is conveyed through telling objects—the Maybach, diamond solitaire, and designer clothes—rather than tedious declarations of affluence. What makes Moms particularly affecting is the way humour and pain coexist. After Radhika dies, Tara’s observation that “Those who leave, leave, and those who stay, move on and live their lives the best that they can” captures the novel’s emotional truth. Sharp, funny, stylish and heartbreaking, the novel’s dialogues make you smile, the observations make you laugh, and seemingly casual sentences keep returning to trouble you long after you have finished the book.
What inspired you to write Moms, and why this title?
I experienced motherhood in a more laissez-faire way than it is done now, and wasn’t prepared for all that it involved when I became a mother 15 years ago. Moms began with an immersion in the world around contemporary motherhood, and I was fascinated not in the abstract but in the social world built around it. I had the title first, as I wanted to write not about one woman’s experience, but rather an entire ecosystem. The story and words came later.
Facade is a central theme of Moms. There is a contrast between the life Radhika is living and what she projects on Instagram. What drew you to this gap?
The gap is one of the defining conditions of modern life, and applies to everyone. Happiness is, in my opinion, an ephemeral feeling which is a by-product of a life well lived, where we navigate responsibility, pain, constraints, drudgery and so on. But those happy moments are now amplified to the exclusion of all that goes into getting there. I think that gap is one of the defining conditions of contemporary life. Radhika is not cynically inventing a false life. She is trying to project it, even to herself, as something more enviable, so that it is more bearable.
Manik’s rules are presented to Radhika almost as a rational arrangement, something she herself comes to accept. But he is not written as a one-dimensional villain.
I wanted to imagine Manik in 3D. Cruelty and control in family life are often exercised through the fig leaf of care and reasonableness, discipline and love. It is this which makes it so difficult to escape. I wanted to explore how domination and cruelty can be normalised in a marriage, and how a woman can accommodate herself to conditions that look intolerable from the outside.
Was the idea of resisting easy female solidarity intentional?
I wanted to explore female relationships from a slightly different prism than they have largely been presented so far—one of solidarity, sisterhood, and friendship—which is of course true, but that didn’t feel right for the world that I was writing. Women are not automatically catapulted into sisterhood because they share gender or motherhood. I wanted the relationships among the women to feel instantly recognisable, relatable, and not gloss over their inherent complications.
What is it about class that continues to interest you as a writer?
Class is such an unsaid, moving target; at the crux of it is belonging. It shapes speech, confidence, friendship, marriage, aspiration... the list can go on, but it is not easily definable. The performance of class makes, to me, for interesting reading and writing.