Shivani Sibal’s Moms peels back the hidden realities of Delhi’s elite mothers

“Money may not buy happiness, but I’d rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.”

This famous quote, attributed to French novelist Françoise Sagan, has been endlessly repackaged online with the Jaguar replaced by a Lamborghini or a Mercedes. The joke rests on the idea that if you must be unhappy, you might as well be unhappy in comfort and luxury. But does money ease life’s harder parts, or simply make the pain more comfortable?

In her sophomore novel, Moms (HarperCollins), writer Shivani Sibal looks beyond the polished surfaces of Delhi’s elite circles to ask what happens when a life that appears to have everything is not, in fact, everything. The story unfolds in the gap between a life that looks perfect on paper and in Instagram images — and the life being lived inside it.

Moms revolves around Radhika Khanna, a privileged Delhi housewife married to a successful and powerful lawyer, with designer clothes, a luxurious home in Jor Bagh, money and social standing that suggest an enviable existence. Yet behind the carefully assembled picture of having it all is a marriage shaped by control, loneliness and rules.

Radhika marries 34-year-old Manik at 23 and becomes a mother almost immediately. Now in her 30s, her world revolves around her daughter, a circle of school mothers — Tara, Naina and Parul — and a marriage governed by Manik’s “crime and punishment” rules, beneath the comforts of a life marked by control.

Having married into a lawyer family, Sibal says her familiarity with Delhi’s legal circles helped bring its codes and hierarchies into the novel. She describes her approach as a “fly-on-the-wall perspective”. “Though I am consumed by my characters, I am not them,” she adds.

The title was the first thing Sibal had in mind, long before she began writing the novel. “I wanted to write about an ecosystem, not a particular person’s experience,” she tells us. We see the world largely through Radhika’s eyes, while meeting her friends and fellow mothers as well as other mother figures, including her own mother and mother-in-law.

“I wanted to break away from the narrow tunnel through which motherhood is perceived, to explore different facets of motherhood, both positive and negative,” Sibal says.

She began writing the novel three years ago, alongside the interruptions of everyday life. Her own experience of motherhood was central to understanding the social and emotional world she was writing about. It exposed her to “a world of feeling and behaviour” she had previously been oblivious to: the constant vigilance, obsessive protectiveness and love, and the occasional boredom of being around small children.

The book captures these contradictions through Radhika. After the birth of her daughter, Samara, she becomes devoted to her child. When Samara starts school, Radhika is constantly involved in her life — chairing parent-teacher meetings, organising extracurricular activities and almost becoming a Kris Jenner-style “momager” to Samara.

Their relationship also swings between intense involvement and emotional absence. Samara observes that her mother does not really look after her in the way her nanny does. Radhika can be fiercely present and strangely detached at the same time.

This contradiction interests Sibal: motherhood can involve overwhelming love devoid of ego while simultaneously demanding repetitive, invisible labour. “Once a woman becomes a mother, that is the parameter on which she is admired, judged and remembered, no matter what she does in other spheres of life,” Sibal says. “I think mothers and motherhood have been too often portrayed as one-dimensional and without examining their layered intricacies.”

Sibal, whose 2021 debut Equations was also set within Delhi’s elite, returns to a world she knows well but approaches it through a different lens. She is interested in what lies beyond glamour and power.

“Power — who holds it, and what it has over us as people and as a society — is something which I have explored through both my novels,” she says. “Glamour can be a bright light, but it is not a balm for loneliness, pain and disappointment.”

In Moms, money and privilege aren’t just markers of status. They are part of the world Radhika inhabits, but they cannot necessarily give her autonomy or protect her from unhappiness. The Maybach, her designer clothes, and Jor Bagh home establish a life of abundance; Manik’s control establishes the limits of it.

The contrast extends to the women around her and the different ways control operates across their lives. Misogyny, Sibal says, does not belong to one class or one kind of woman.

“Misogyny changes its language based on its setting, but the underlying architecture of control persists,” she says. Sometimes it is obvious, as when the police dismiss Tara because there is “no man in the house” while her much older husband is bedridden. At other times, it is dressed as care, protection, love or duty — as with Manik or Radhika’s mother. “I didn’t want to present it as a class issue; rather, as a more shape-shifting entity with different presentations across class barriers,” she says.

For all its wealth and polish, Moms is ultimately interested in the things money cannot smooth over — loneliness, control, marriage, and the complicated business of being a woman.

Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp

Download the TNIE app to stay with us and follow the latest