New York-based Megha Majumdar sets her second novel, A Guardian and a Thief, a National Book Award finalist and an Oprah Book Club pick, in Kolkata of the future. But the city’s present-day denizens, battling uncharacteristic heat, frequent storms and catastrophic rains brought on by global warming, may feel that they are already living through it.
Writers like Amitav Ghosh have chronicled “monsters” in the garb of extreme events in their books. In The Hungry Tide (2004), the concluding pages describe a cyclone which sends a great wall of water surging through the mangrove forests in the Sundarbans. Climate disasters have upended lives, resulting in waves of migration.
Majumdar imagines the physical horror of living through such acute discomfort, “the sun a pistol against one’s head”, and the consequences thereof, like drought, floods and hunger. As the city, rife with corruption, weeps for a “handful of something to eat”, Majumdar introduces readers to her two sets of protagonists, on either side of the class divide, one with resources, one without.
Dadu, his daughter Ma and granddaughter Mishti are leaving the city in seven days to join the child’s father in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he has accepted a research position on mosquito-borne diseases at a laboratory. After rounds of exhausting paperwork, convincing bureaucrats of his usefulness to America, he finally manages to get climate visas for his family. But when we are told, “All Ma needed to do was survive these seven days”, it ominously portends the happenings that will unfold over a week.
Shifting rights and wrongs
Ma and Dadu take their guardianship of Mishti very seriously. Ma has routinely pilfered from donations made to the shelter where she used to work before quitting for the impending journey to America; Dadu cannot believe his granddaughter is going hungry in his beloved city, and doesn’t think twice before snatching an orange from a boy. After all, the pain of others is never as “acute or compelling as one’s own pain”. But someone knows about Ma’s secret, and thereby hangs a tale of moral ambiguity, fate, exile, home, love and loss.
Boomba had moved into the shelter after he landed in the city from his village in search of work. Feeling responsible for his poor family, and a brother, Robi, whom he adores, he is looking for ways to find a home for them, when he witnesses Ma squirrelling away nuts, raisins, rice and lentils. Majumdar, like in her debut novel, A Burning, examines human nature in its extremity. How do people behave under pressure, in times of desperation and acute hunger? Where is their moral centre? Do ideas of right and wrong shift? What does love or hope look like? Aren’t Ma and Boomba both guardians and thieves? Like Ma, Boomba’s moral compass points toward the north of his own family — he is “no monster”.
Author Megha Majumdar (left) with American talk show host Oprah Winfrey.
| Photo Credit:
Oprah’s Book Club/ meghamajumdar.com
Of leaving home
It is Ma’s duty, as a guardian, “to put into action the beautiful ideal of hope”. But where is hope? Ma thinks harshly, perhaps echoing struggling, hungry mothers around the world. “Hope for the future was no shy bloom but a blood-maddened creature, fanged and toothed, with its own knowledge of history’s hostilities and the cages of the present. Hope wasn’t soft or tender. It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived.”
In a city full of contradictions, the crisis is a leveller of sorts, but there’s no comparison between what the rich suffer and what the poor endure. Majumdar’s descriptions of Ma’s life and home are pitch perfect, but she comes up a tad short while writing about Boomba and his family, particularly their village experiences. That’s a minor quibble in a book that puts moral dilemmas under the scanner in such terrifying fashion.
It’s perhaps not amiss to wish that Majumdar, who was born in Kolkata and moved to the U.S. for her studies, writes about the immigrant experience someday in the future. In this book, she devotes a brilliant, tiny chapter on Mishti’s father’s America. For Baba, the pride of having immigrated is also, in truth, the wound. And he wants every opportunity to examine the wound, always looking for an opportunity to speak about the home he has left behind.
sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in
A Guardian and a Thief
Megha Majumdar
Hamish Hamilton
₹699
Published – November 21, 2025 06:10 am IST
