“Plenty of brown girls divide themselves in two, as I had, but over time, maintaining both selves takes a toll. Away from family, I could pretend that I was not two separate people, one insufficiently dutiful and the other insufficiently free, but one nearly coherent being,” says the protagonist of the novel Goddess Complex, which perfectly portrays how brown girls navigate their identities. The author, Sanjena Sathian, churns out a feminist-thriller-fiction kind of genre-bending story that explores important issues, including motherhood, abortion, fertility, single women, marriage, and identity.
The story follows an academic who is separated from her husband and has recently gone through an abortion. She begins receiving strange messages from unknown numbers asking about her pregnancy and marriage status. She eventually decides to confront this nonsense but ends up recuperating (or rather being surveilled) at a fertility cult.
Amid all the drama, there’s a constant conundrum that the protagonist feels and suffers from—the stakes of being a woman—the three mortifying M’s of today’s “modern” women: marriage, mortgage, and motherhood. She feels cheated by her body, and there’s this sense of incomprehensibility about her body that looms large above her—the feeling of how she is supposed to feel the femininity of her body (that women around her effortlessly feel), of how her body is naturally designed to conceive and produce. Many South Asian women will relate.
She sees herself in contrast to her pregnant best friend. These words succinctly point out her dilemma (and that of many other South Asians) when they choose not to conform to society’s femininity standards—when they feel rejected by society for failing to fulfil their biological duty: “I was becoming an accessory, an artefact of her past; she was making her own way, going somewhere I could not follow. This—her baby, her new blood family—would calcify the change. Our private subjectivities would diverge. There were so many names for the precise femininity she was already experiencing, now. There were books and blogs, and a public fellowship of mothers to which she would soon belong. I was being left behind—a childless divorcée in her thirties—to make a life without script as she moved ahead into a life with clear milestones, each with its own gift registry.”
And then some women desire motherhood to the point of preaching pain, reproduction, and sacrifice as the only truths of womanhood, while reprimanding, cussing, and putting down women who choose an epidural, a childless marriage, abortions, and freedom from the supposed duties of their bodies. The book, in a way, reminds readers how this lack of sisterhood further affects women’s collective voice for their demands and rights—and how they need to rise against this man-made divide-and-rule policy, to understand how it is men who ultimately benefit from their bodies, and not them.
Meanwhile, it also, interestingly, points out—as we all are witnessing and suffering from—the repercussions of being on social media, a platform that provides virtual proximity to anyone in the world. And how that’s changing the scenario for women, and for motherhood, fertility, and women’s health, where massive amounts of women’s data regarding their bodies, cycles, and lives are being shared (mostly without their consent); where anyone can stalk and manipulate any woman; where anyone can become an expert in pregnancy and fertility—and even become an “influencer.” It shows the vulnerability that hovers above women who use social media, and how it largely works to their disadvantage.
In many ways, the novel mirrors society’s contrasting dilemmas of modern womanhood: the Instagram mothers who curate their journeys in glossy reels, the childfree women who are quietly—or sometimes loudly—punished for “falling behind,” and the countless women who toggle between longing, rejection, rebellion, and conformity. The fertility cult in Sathian’s story may feel extreme, but the question it aptly poses is whether it is really far from the way algorithms, influencers, and fertility apps already surveil, shame, and shape women’s choices today.Goddess Complex refuses to offer tidy answers. Instead, it leaves readers with an unsettling but crucial question: what would women’s lives look like if they were not constantly being measured against the set standards of femininity and womanhood—or against each other? And perhaps, it asks them to reject these standards and scripts and write a new one altogether—one that allows women to exist as a whole.
