Shivani Sibal

The Interview : Shivani Sibal

Rachna Singh, editor of The Wise Owl, talks to Shivani Sibal, the author of Moms and Equations.

Congratulations Shivani on the release of your book Moms. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with The Wise Owl about your book.

RS: At the heart of Moms is Radhika Khanna, a woman who appears to have it all. Yet, as the novel unfolds, the polished façade of domestic and social perfection begins to reveal emotional fault lines. What drew you to explore this tension between outward success and inner turmoil?

SS: Indeed. It is possible today with social media to present a beautiful , curated, airbrushed version of one’s life, to hide away all the messiness and turmoil that is an inherent part of the human condition. It is all pervasive, as if the performance of a life well lived is as important as actually living it.  I think it is fascinating how normalised this has become, and wanted to explore these themes in this novel .

RS: The world of Moms feels both intimate and unsettlingly authentic, capturing the subtle rituals, alliances, and fractures that shape life within a privileged urban community. Our readers would be eager to know how much of this landscape grew out of lived observation, and how much emerged through the imaginative demands of fiction?

SS: Delhi is my home, and I know it’s nuances unquestionably , and I could see the characters walk the street that I walk in my head. The characters are all fictious of course, but the setting has to be real for  I had to be a mother for a length of time to write this book – it would be dishonest to say I could have written it without that lived experience.

Once I became a mother, I was exposed to a world of feeling and behaviour that I was previously oblivious to, both positive and negative. The constant vigilance that your brain is unable to shake off. The sometimes boredom of the company of small children, even your own. The endless management. Obsessive love and protectiveness, devoid of ego. After a mother, that is the parameter on which she is admired, judged and remembered, no matter what she does in other spheres of life. I think mothers and motherhood have too often been portrayed as one-dimensional, without examining their layered intricacies. This is what I wanted to explore.

RS: Radhika’s life is shaped by expectations—of motherhood, marriage, beauty, and social success. Which of these pressures do you think women today find the hardest to resist?

SS: I think the pressure to appear to have a better life than others, whether one does or not, is the marker of our times. The erasure of every negative part of our lives and amplification of the positive has a deep impact on both individual and society.

RS: Moms raises intriguing questions about visibility and concealment in an age of constant self-curation. Did social media emerge primarily as a social reality of the world you were depicting, or as a literary device through which to explore deeper questions of identity and loneliness?

SS: A bit of both. What interested me was the gap between what is shown and what is lived. The  performance of social media can seep into the self. I would go as far as to say that it can colour how we feel in unobserved moments. The dichotomy of being constantly visible and at the same time profoundly concealed interested me.

RS:  Many readers may see Moms as a critique of privilege, yet it is also a deeply empathetic portrait of loneliness. How did you balance social commentary with emotional storytelling?

SS:  Privilege doesn’t mean that one doesn’t suffer from normal human vulnerability, and I wanted to explore that. It certainly cushions and disguises some realities, but it does not remove loneliness, disappointment, or pain. I don’t want my characters to be reduced to their circumstances, good or bad, I want them to feel fully human and relatable, no matter what their social standing.

RS: The title of your book is simple and yet very apt. I particularly found the plurality of the title very intriguing. Tell us what made you decide on this title for your book and how important was this plurality to your conception of the novel?

SS: I had the title before I wrote a single word. I didn’t want to write about a singular experience, rather, an entire ecosystem.

There are many mothers in the novel, each with their own performance and understanding of motherhood, which is central to the story. Motherhood Is projected in popular culture through a very narrow, positive prism and the many mothers in the story are more layered in their approach to motherhood, whether it is their raison de etre, or they endure it, hide behind it, weaponize it ,and how they are judged for their performance of it.

I was interested in the performance of competence, the constant management, the strange mixture of intimacy and competition, and the way a woman can become both highly visible and oddly erased at the same time.

RS: The novel explores power in unexpected places—schools, neighbourhood circles, friendships, and family relationships. Were you consciously interested in the ways power operates outside traditional institutions?

SS: The performance of power is a recurring theme in both my novels. It governs so much of the human condition that I remain fascinated by its machinations, how it is perceived, displayed, disguised and asserted in all speres of life.

RS: Your writing has been described as both provocative and deeply moving. Were there scenes or emotional truths in the novel that were particularly difficult to write?

SS: My writing style is more fly-on-the wall and observational. I am not my characters, this is not my life. It is a curious dichotomy of being consumed by them and removed from them at the same time.

RS: What conversations do you hope Moms will spark among readers about motherhood and a woman’s identity?

SS: I hope it will make the reader think about motherhood in a less monolithic prism, as less of a finished work and more as a flawed work in progress.

Thank you so much Shivani for talking with The Wise Owl about your book. We wish you and your book great success.