Published Oct 04, 2026 | 7:00 AM ⚊ Updated Oct 04, 2026 | 7:00 AM
With Moms, Shivani Sibal moves further into the privileged world. This time, the subject is motherhood, but the novel is about much more than mothers.
Synopsis: In With Moms, Sibal moves deeper into the privileged world. This time the subject is motherhood, but the novel is about much more than mothers. It is about status, marriage, loneliness, social performance, and the strange ways contemporary urban life turns even intimacy into a form of competition.
There is a particular kind of anxiety that belongs to people who appear to have everything. It is hard to see from the outside because privilege often looks like ease. The house is beautiful, the children attend the right schools, the calendar is filled with lunches, parties and social commitments, and every domestic inconvenience can seemingly be solved with money. Yet beneath this carefully maintained surface lies another reality: the exhausting need to preserve the appearance of a perfect life.
Shivani Sibal’s Moms enters this world with an unusually attentive eye. Her second novel follows Equations, her impressive debut, which examined the intricate class relations within an affluent Delhi family and the people who lived around it. Equations announced a writer with a sharp understanding of social hierarchies, but more importantly, it showed Sibal’s ability to look beyond the obvious divisions of privilege and deprivation.
With Moms, Sibal moves further inside the privileged world. This time the subject is motherhood, but the novel is about much more than mothers. It is about status, marriage, loneliness, social performance, and the strange ways contemporary urban life turns even intimacy into a form of competition.
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Radhika Khanna seems to possess the life that many people are trained to desire. She lives in an affluent Delhi neighbourhood, has a comfortable home, domestic help, a husband and a daughter, and belongs to a social circle in which schools, friendships, holidays and parties become markers of position.
But Sibal’s achievement is that she doesn’t let us mistake comfort for freedom.
An elaborate system of expectations governs Radhika’s days. Her appearance matters. Her friendships matter. Her daughter’s school matters. The people she meets matter. Even how she presents her family to the outside world becomes part of an endless exercise in self-management.
Motherhood, in this world, is no longer confined to affection or care. It becomes a public performance.
The child is loved, certainly, but the child also becomes a reflection of the mother. The school the child attends, the friends she makes, the activities she participates in and the circles she enters all become extensions of the family’s social identity.
This is one of the sharpest observations in Moms. Sibal understands that contemporary privilege does not eliminate anxiety. It often changes its form.
When motherhood becomes competition
The mothers in Sibal’s Delhi are not simply competing with one another over their children. They are competing over the lives their children appear to represent.
The school gate becomes a social institution. A birthday party becomes a statement. A lunch becomes an opportunity for positioning. A photograph becomes part of a carefully managed public identity. Even friendship is rarely free from calculation.
Sibal is particularly good at observing these small transactions. She understands the language of social acceptance, the polite exchange that carries a hidden judgment, the compliment that contains a comparison and the apparently harmless question that reveals an entire hierarchy.
Yet she never turns these women into easy objects of ridicule.
That is important.
A lesser novel could have made Moms a satire of wealthy Delhi women obsessed with designer clothes, private schools and social media. Sibal chooses something harder. She asks why these women need the approval they appear to have already secured.
The answer is not simply vanity. It is insecurity.
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Radhika’s privilege does not necessarily translate into autonomy. Her life is shaped by rules, expectations and forms of control that are sometimes explicit and sometimes internalised.
Radhika’s husband, Manik, has created a handwritten list of rules governing her behaviour, while even their daughter’s crying is subject to a precise time limit. The domestic world therefore acquires the logic of surveillance and regulation.
The details are disturbing precisely because they are presented without theatrical exaggeration.
Sibal’s great strength is her restraint. She does not need to announce that something is oppressive. She allows the arrangement itself to reveal its violence.
This also connects Moms with Equations. In both novels, Sibal is interested in structures that people learn to inhabit before they learn to question them. Class, marriage, gender and social aspiration are not abstract concepts in her fiction. They are experienced through bedrooms, kitchens, cars, schools, conversations and everyday gestures.
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What makes Sibal’s writing particularly promising is her interest in the human subject beneath the social category.
Her characters are never merely ‘rich’, ‘poor’, ‘privileged’ or ‘oppressed’. They are contradictory people carrying desires they cannot always articulate. They want security but resent the structures that provide it. They desire recognition while fearing exposure. They perform confidence while negotiating private insecurity.
This is where Sibal’s writing rises above social commentary.
Her prose is controlled and observant. She does not over-explain her characters. Her narrative moves with quiet confidence, letting social details accumulate until the larger structure becomes visible.
Her storytelling also shows notable fluidity. She knows when to stay with a gesture and when to move the narrative forward. The result is prose that remains accessible without becoming simplistic.
Equations achieved the difficult feat of making class visible without turning the novel into a sociological thesis. Moms continues that project but shifts its attention from the relationship between those who have and those who serve to the psychological cost of maintaining privilege itself.
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Moms have another layer that deserves attention. The perfect life of the privileged household is made possible by people whose labour often remains invisible.
Domestic workers, drivers, caregivers, teachers and other service providers occupy the edges of the affluent world. They make its smooth functioning possible, yet they rarely receive equal recognition within it.
Sibal does not romanticise this relationship. Nor does she turn the domestic worker into a convenient moral corrective to the privileged characters.
Instead, she shows how deeply unequal the household’s architecture remains.
The irony is striking. The elite mother is herself exhausted by the demands of motherhood. Yet, her ability to manage that exhaustion depends upon a large network of other women and workers whose own burdens remain largely unexamined.
The novel is strongest when it allows these contradictions to exist together.
A clear continuity runs through Sibal’s two novels. Equations examined the architecture of class. Moms examines the emotional architecture of privilege.
The second novel also shows a writer becoming more assured of her subject.
Equations was an ambitious debut, and its greatest achievement was its refusal to simplify the relationship between the privileged family and those who lived in its shadow. Moms takes that observational intelligence into a more intimate territory.
At a time when contemporary fiction often turns towards large historical, political or spectacular subjects, Sibal is interested in something quieter. She examines the ordinary structures through which people experience power in their everyday lives. Her real subject is human behaviour. That is where her literary promise lies.
Moms does not offer a grand rebellion against the world it describes. Its power comes from recognising that privilege rarely collapses in a single dramatic moment. More often, its contradictions accumulate slowly.
A woman begins to question a marriage. A friendship becomes competitive. A child becomes a source of anxiety rather than uncomplicated joy. A social circle that once offered security begins to feel suffocating. A carefully maintained public image begins to crack.
Sibal understands these small fractures.
Her Delhi is not merely a geographical location. It is a social imagination in which success has become inseparable from visibility. To belong is to be seen belonging. To be a good mother is to produce evidence of good motherhood. To have a successful child is, in some measure, to have succeeded oneself.
And this is perhaps the most unsettling question Moms leaves behind: what happens when a life becomes so carefully curated that there is no longer enough room left inside it for uncertainty, failure or desire?
Sibal does not answer the question with a manifesto. She does something more appropriate to fiction. She gives us a woman living inside the question.
With Moms, Sibal confirms the promise of Equations and extends it into a richer examination of contemporary Indian life. Her writing has a measured flow, an attentive eye and a strong instinct for the human detail through which larger social realities become visible. She brings both intelligence and compassion to her characters.
If Equations announced the arrival of a distinctive new voice, Moms gives us reason to expect more.
Sibal already shows the qualities of a serious novelist, an ability to observe without preaching, to critique without simplifying and, above all, to remain interested in the complicated human beings who live inside the structures we so readily call society.
Title: Moms
Author: Shivani Sibal
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Price: INR 599/
(Views are personal. Edited by Majnu Babu).
