Review | ‘Moms’ by Shivani Sibal offers a startling glimpse into the lives of Delhi’s elite

In 1897, E.A. Robinson wrote a poem about the super affluent Richard Cory who was richer than a king, and the envy of the entire neighbourhood that would have loved to live his life even if only for a day. The poem ends with the shocking, tragic lines: And Richard Cory, one calm summer night/ Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Why anyone who has every external determinant of happiness and success would give up their life is the inexplicable human conundrum — then and now. This is the theme explored, over a century later, by Shivani Sibal in her seemingly straightforward novel, Moms.

The protagonist, Radhika, at 23, becomes the ‘wife’ of the uber successful Delhi-based 34-year-old lawyer, Manik Khanna. Radhika’s schoolgoing daughter, Samara, offers to her the second identity — that of a ‘mom’. She tries her best to create layers within these limiting identities and yet finds herself trapped with a sense of zero self-worth.

An entire ecosystem witnesses Manik’s cruelty towards his wife but it will keep quiet because what happens between partners is a private matter even if things unfold in public. The reward and punishment system in marriage; the pressure on the arm-candy wife to perpetually look not a day older and weigh not a kilogram more than the day you got married, even after childbirth; the indifference of parents towards a married offspring as they seek freedom from parenthood — this novel divulges it all.

It deals with the Evian and Perrier, business-lounge lifestyles of a class of people whose Insta timelines make them appear spotlessly happy and winning at all times. How can such a class cry for attention, even in fiction? Isn’t this the centre that wields power over the margins?

Mass of marginalities

On the surface, this novel looks like the repeated and, therefore, tiresome feminist sorrow of not finding meaning in a system that cannot let a woman win. If earlier, women had to be homemakers and nothing else, now, it is a social stigma if all you are is a homemaker. At another level, however, this novel provokes the reader to examine life and literature closely. For a few decades now, stories that speak for the disenfranchised, the marginalised, the subaltern have come to be seen as the ones that have purpose, that speak for political change and become eligible to win prizes. Moms, however, uncovers the fragilities of the so-called privileged. It is pointless to ask questions such as ‘But why did she…?’, ‘Why didn’t she…?’, ‘What stopped her…?’ There is no answer to Radhika’s last words: “I can’t help it if I grew up in privilege. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain.”

While the editor could have suggested a more engaging and relevant title to this novel, the story does tether you to a few seismic explorations. What if the concept of a mainstream is itself nothing but a construct? What if there never has been a centre that defines the margins? What if we are all nothing but a mass of collective marginalities? Is it a crime to be born in privilege? Are the rich of a society to be blamed because there are starving children in far-off Africa? Are you ‘always-already’ in power because you are not lower class or caste? Is the option to feel pain and victimhood not available to the affluent?

Whether Richard Cory or Radhika, individual lives barely matter because life simply ‘moves on’. The recent news of a retired judge allegedly being responsible for the murder of her daughter-in-law and the discussions around ‘trad-wives’ made popular by the novel Yesteryear tell us exactly what Moms tells us: that the scariest part of fiction is its reality component. We disregard it at our own peril.

Moms

Shivani Sibal

Harper Fiction

₹599

The reviewer, a Sahitya Akademi translation award winner, is the editor of ‘250 Years Of Jane Austen: Indian Responses’.