This moral thriller offers a perceptive account of specifically Indian anxieties
T
he title characters of Megha Majumdar’s second novel are a young man referred to only by a nickname, Boomba, and a woman known as Ma. Each regards themselves as a guardian, and the other as a thief. The reader is not asked to take sides, but instead to observe how the world makes thieves of guardians, and vice versa.
A Guardian and a Thief takes place over what is meant to be the last week of Ma living in Kolkata. She, her father and her two-year-old daughter are about to join Ma’s husband in the United States, as the recipients of prized “climate visas”. Floods and extreme heat have turned Kolkata into a city of persistent food shortages. Black marketeers hoard eggs, fruit and vegetables, while fish, previously the cornerstone of Bengali cooking, has vanished altogether. The terrifying word famine is disinterred. This is one of the many ways in which climate change has sent Kolkata forward into the past. While Majumdar’s acclaimed debut, A Burning, laid out the appalling consequences of a young woman’s Facebook post, in A Guardian and a Thief the city appears to be almost entirely smartphone-free.
For years, Ma, who sincerely believes herself to be an honest and altruistic person, has got away with stealing food from the homeless shelter that she manages. She has, after all, an old father and an infant daughter to take care of – if she is a thief, it is only because she is a guardian. But then, just as she is about to leave Kolkata behind, a new shelter resident who has observed her theft breaks into her house. Boomba takes not only the stolen food, but her purse, which contains her family’s passports and the climate visas that will open the gates of America.
