Five years after her debut novel Equations, Shivani Sibal returns to the Delhi she knows well, but looks at it from a different room. Her second novel, Moms (HarperCollins), takes us inside the lives of women in an affluent corner of the city where good schools, beautiful homes, premeditated parties and social standing are part of everyday life. At its centre is Radhika Khanna, a wife and mother whose life seems, from the outside, enviably complete. Sibal is interested in what that appearance demands of a woman, that’s the constant work of keeping things together, looking composed and making a complicated life appear effortless.

Motherhood gives the novel its title, but Moms is really interested in the world that gathers around it. There are school gates and WhatsApp-like social circles, friendships that contain affection as well as rivalry, discreet calculations of status, and the peculiar intimacy that develops between women who are watching one another raise their children. Sibal writes about that ecosystem without turning it into a simple story of supportive female friendship or competitive “mom culture”. What interests her are the contradictions.  Women can care for one another and judge one another, feel secure one moment and threatened the next. Privilege may make their lives comfortable, but it does not necessarily make them uncomplicated.

It is territory that connects Moms to Sibal’s earlier work while also taking her fiction somewhere more intimate. Equations, published in 2021, examined class, aspiration and power through the lives of two childhood friends from different social worlds; in the new novel, those questions of hierarchy and control enter the home, the marriage, the body and the private life of a woman. Social media adds another layer, the requirement not merely to live well, but to be seen living well. Through Radhika and the women around her, Sibal looks closely at the distance between the picture presented to the world and everything that cannot quite be made to fit inside the frame.

In this interview to The Punch Magazine, Sibal talks about the performance of perfection, the hierarchies of motherhood, female friendship, privilege, loneliness and the pressures women absorb without always naming them. She also reflects on why school-gate politics fascinated her, how social media sharpens the demand to appear effortless, and why power remains one of the themes she keeps returning to. Excerpts:

One distinctive marker of our times is that we must not just live a good life, but actively appear to be doing so. What interested me was the gap between the life a woman is seen to have and the life she is actually living. On the face of it, Radhika embodies a particular urban ideal: an advantageous marriage, motherhood, position, beauty and affluence. I wanted to explore the strain beneath maintaining this image of perfection.

Yes, very much. I wanted to explore not just one woman’s experience, but an entire ecosystem. I don’t think I could have written this book had I not been a mother myself and experienced some of those particular nuances from within. The supportive nature of female friendships aside, I wanted to explore it from a more layered prism.

I was interested in the world mothers create around one another — the small hierarchies,  the latent competition, the alliances, the judgments, the insecurities. I also wanted to explore female friendship through a more layered prism, of jealousy, one upmanship, sometimes sabotage. Female friendships are rarely simple, and I wanted to look into their intricacies. 

Power: who holds it, who bows down to it, and how it governs almost everything has always fascinated me. In this context, the school-gate world can look trivial to the casual viewer, but beneath the surface there is so much simmering. It has a charged mix of competition, class anxiety, moral theatre, and female friendships and exclusion at play, and makes for very interesting writing and reading in my opinion. 

Indeed, I do think this is true. Not just mothers, all women today are expected to manage everything, and making that management look effortless is an integral part of that performance. 

Grace under pressure is further pressure, erasing natural feelings like fatigue, hopelessness, and pain, these are not overly welcome in the Insta world. 

The contrast between privilege and pain, beauty and private despair is something which I wanted to explore. Certainly, privilege insulates one from many, many things, but it cannot erase unhappiness, loneliness, control or private distress. It is easy to forget this when one views the public performance of privilege, and I wanted to dispel this notion. 

Equations and Moms both concern themselves with class and privilege. Moms, and Radhika’s character in particular, allowed me to examine the same themes with a different lens of a woman’s family life and interior life, and what perfection often looks and feels like from the inside.