A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF, by Megha Majumdar
“A Guardian and a Thief,” Megha Majumdar’s new novel, begins with an ending. Ma, the protagonist, prepares a meager dinner of rice and eggs, one of the final meals her family will eat in a famine-ridden, near-future Kolkata. The city is in the grips of climate disaster. Markets once full of “slow shoppers inspecting the purple shine of eggplant and pressing guavas hard as hail” now have “nothing but some onion peel scattered at the edges where the pavement gave way to earth.”
But Ma is about to escape this emptiness. Her husband, a scientist, is working in the United States and has secured “climate visas” for Ma; their 2-year-old daughter, Mishti; and Ma’s widowed father, Dadu, to join him in Michigan. In one week, the three of them will leave. “All Ma needed to do,” Majumdar writes, “was survive these seven days.” A statement as bald as this, at the start of any novel, is a warning.
Ma isn’t the novel’s only protagonist. Majumdar alternates between her and Boomba, a direly poor young man living in a shelter that Ma manages. He has come to Kolkata from his flooded rural village to establish a foothold for his parents and toddler brother, Robi, whom Boomba has cared for as if he were his own child. On arriving in the city, Boomba is astounded by its wealth. Even as Ma worries that she can’t survive there, stealing food donations from the shelter to feed her family, Boomba marvels at the houses with “furniture in the doorway simply for storing shoes.”
He learns quickly, though, that wonder is an attitude he must quash. So is his belief in the “worth of honesty.” If he wants to secure a future, he has to accept the “menacing truth” that hits him when he sees Ma smuggling eggs out of the shelter: “Take what you want, or others will take it.” He readily follows this directive when he comes across Ma’s purse, unaware that her family’s passports are inside.
From this point on, Ma’s and Boomba’s fates are intertwined. The title of the novel applies to both protagonists; each is a guardian and a thief. As they struggle against each other, ultimately becoming mortal enemies, Majumdar creates a tense and deeply compassionate portrait of desperation, fear and the combined selflessness and selfishness of parenthood.
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