Megha Majumdar’s second novel, chosen by Oprah and a bestseller, has generated a good deal of excitement.
In A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf), set in the not-so-distant future, a young woman, her father, and her two-year-old daughter receive a climate visa from the U.S. to seek refuge from a brutal drought and the ensuing food shortage in Kolkata. Ma, the protagonist, prepares for a new life in Michigan that will reunite her family with her husband, a malaria researcher in Ann Arbor.
The novel opens with sharp and incisive prose from the get-go. The story unfolds over seven days as Ma dreams of a new life in “a country of encompassing Hope, sustained by the people despite the peddlers of fear and pursuers of gain who wore the ill-fitting costumes of political representation.” In this apocalyptic future—evoking a Black Mirror-like sensibility—public transport buses must pass daily emission tests before running their routes. Offices stay open late into the evening so people can avoid the blistering daytime heat. Street clashes turn violent in seconds. In this dystopian Kolkata, dogs with metal paws take over patrol duty from human police officers, “peacefully tolerating heat that would have a true animal panting.”
Ma quits her job as a manager at a local shelter just days before their departure. But when a shelter resident catches her pilfering food rations to feed her fast-growing daughter, Misthi, he tracks her home and steals the food she has stored away—along with her purse, which contains the precious climate visa stamp on their passports. We soon meet Boomba, the shelter resident-turned-thief, an internally displaced climate refugee who moved to Kolkata to seek a more stable employment to support his parents and younger brother, Robi. Boomba’s family had lost their farmland to flood waters, and his father had been attacked by a tiger hungry enough to attack humans.
Climate science warns us about frequent floods, food shortages, and more vector-borne diseases. But what do those doomsday forecasts mean for daily life? How will humans adapt, adopt, persevere, or give up? In Majumdar’s climate-changed Kolkata, Ma, Dadu, and their neighbors adapt and cope by hoarding food supplies, hunting down mosquitoes, those carriers of deadly and newly spreading diseases, or seeking underground markets selling luxuries like apples.
Every quotidian action is imbued with climate-altered significance. In Majumdar’s Kolkata, we find street sellers of tastes because taste has become a discrete commodity that could be bought for a price, no longer an essential element of meals prepared at home. Protein pastes. Seaweed. False farmed fish, as fish of the ocean and rivers are long gone. The seller of tastes hawks, “Taste, taste, buy a taste! . . .Caramel, chocolate, orange, I have all tastes. Buy a taste!”
The meticulous attention to detail in this futuristic and disturbing India is refreshing in its novelty and sobering in its reality-adjacent portrayal of the everyday struggle for survival.
In times of crisis people will do whatever it takes to survive and protect those they love. Here, an English-speaking urban woman steals from her employer to feed her child, while a young boy from the village steals to secure his family’s future. The climate crisis, though omnipresent, remains an almost indifferent backdrop—neither villain nor savior. To remain hopeful is to persevere. Ma does whatever it takes to secure their passage to America. Hope is nothing without a fight for survival as even Dada, her father, acts in ways that he would have deemed unbecoming in his beloved city’s fellow denizens: “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.”
Contemporary American culture is replete with renderings of dystopian futures in narrative and visual fiction. A Guardian and a Thief offers something rare—a new and original interpretation of the ongoing and impending climate catastrophe, seen through the eyes of those most likely to suffer the worst of it—communities in the Global South. The storytelling is fast-paced and alive. A morbid fascination for a future that may well befall the reader keeps the pages turned. For readers of fiction set in South Asia, its blend of realism and speculation feels urgently familiar, both intimate and universal. At a little over two hundred pages, A Guardian and a Thief is a harbinger of calamity and hope. A disquieting must-read.
Girija Sankar, a freelance writer based in the Atlanta metro area, works in global health.