Book Review
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

by Sumaiya Aftab Ahmed

Like two-toned eyeshadow, the contrasts in Megha Majumdar’s second novel, A Guardian and a Thief, shift and blur. At once devastating and diverting, wry and sincere, this commanding literary thriller concentrates on two families contending with climate change in West Bengal’s imminent future. With a play’s economy, the book’s 224 pages resonate long after reading, charging the air with disquiet. When I finished it on the subway, I couldn’t reconcile its ending with everyone’s commute screeching along as usual. Every line weighs what people could lose to planetary doom. But what touched me most was how, rather than diminish her characters to despair, Majumdar delights in how they express affection.

The main storyline transpires over seven days in Kolkata on the cusp of famine. Ma’s rations are dwindling. Fortunately, she, her toddler Mishti, and widowed father Dadu have a flight on Sunday, soon enough “to cast its glow over the whole week.” They’re set to join Ma’s husband Baba in Ann Arbor on “climate visas.”

Majumdar renders a stricken Kolkata, “the heat a hand clamped upon the mouth,” reminding me of the severe landscape dinosaurs succumbed to during “The Rite of Spring” sequence in Disney’s Fantasia. Roadside markets that once glowed with greens and threw back “the purple shine of eggplant” now sell scant produce. Typical Bengali palates favoring freshwater fishes, leafy vegetables, and rice have had to accept canned synthetic seafood, algae, and cricket flour.

Ma, a longtime manager at a shelter for adults with children, hasn’t resorted to such unfamiliar food. She and her family live in a comfortable home where Ma’s late, forward-thinking mother had installed a tank to harvest rain and solar panels to power air-conditioning. What Ma seeks to escape, twenty-year-old Boomba can only covet. Boomba grew up destitute in a flood-prone village, retreating from rising waters to a bamboo and tarp shed on stilts. Since moving to Kolkata at eighteen, he has been working a series of odd jobs to procure proper housing for his parents and four-year-old brother. A particularly dispiriting setback brings Boomba to Ma’s shelter.

In keeping with her incisive debut novel, A Burning, Majumdar wrings morally murky suspense out of her characters’ small decisions. Ma makes a well-meaning exception to admit Boomba into the shelter without a child, “tender-hearted in her time of departure.” Then, having secured visa-stamped passports, she nonchalantly leaves her kitchen window ajar. The mise en scène includes a storeroom, “the dark fist of the house” where Ma has been stashing provisions she stole from a billionaire’s donations to the shelter. Elsewhere, props including a secateur, pressure cooker, and tea set await their purpose. When Boomba breaks in for food after witnessing Ma’s theft, he takes Ma’s purse containing her family’s immigration documents. As Ma and Dadu’s frantic search intensifies, each dormant object gets its role. The plot’s cat-and-mouse simplicity belies Majumdar’s complex inquiry into how cruelty and kindness turn up in the same people.

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Climate activists often discuss what world children will inherit. Majumdar presses the point by centering Mishti in subtle ways. Ma, Dadu, and Baba are Bengali words for mother, grandfather, and father, the characters’ relations to Mishti. True to her name, meaning sweet, Mishti enlivens dire circumstances. “Time moved like the bellow of a harmonium, now squeezed, now elongated,” as Ma and Dadu survey Boomba’s break-in, “and steadied itself only when Ma felt Mishti’s small hand on her knee.”

The novel’s fairy-tale omniscience orbits Mishti too. “Out they went into the night,” Majumdar writes. “Three in the morning, and the moon hung alone in the sky,” like in a picture book, “melancholy as a painting in an after-hours gallery.” Readying for Sunday’s flight, Ma bids her kitchen goodbye in her own version of Goodnight Moon, having already said farewell to the city and “to the drowsiest of those afternoon hours when she had carved out of the clock a turn for herself, made lemonades with three cubes of ice twisted from a tray and sat down on the floor to drink, nightie lifted up to her knees, like a girl.”

At two years old, Mishti is too young to form memories of her birthplace. Majumdar’s affection for Kolkata, increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather, is evident in her attention to droll minor characters. A bus conductor announces “the route in a flawless recitation, its own poem of the city.” A peddler scoffs at Ma’s posters about the lost passports, imagining that people have flown to England with them. “They are already taking pictures in front of Big Ben,” the peddler says. “And here you are, putting posters up. Some people really have endless hope!” A cozy mystery’s warmth emanates from the wonderful elderly neighbor, Mrs. Sen, who calls her pet birds, “my darlings,” and sends Ma and Dadu off on their quest with “a parrot climbing sideways up her arm.” When Dadu suggests taking evidence of Boomba’s burglary to the police, Mrs. Sen quips, “Are you a CEO? Or do you have a cousin who is a politician?”

Grief for Kolkata includes longing for its food. Ma misses her routines of buying “a newspaper bag of kochuri and a clay pot of dal flecked with coconut.” She remembers the residue from rinsing rice, “like an overcast sky in the bowl,” and how she used to discard the cloudy water, “not minding if a few grains slipped into the sink.”

Though I got lost in a few lengthy sentences, I collected a myriad for their unadorned beauty. Two of my favorites come from Boomba’s stint as a boatman: “Garlands swirled in eddies, far from their day of ceremony. On the far banks, trees and pastel houses passed, a mirror or a solar-paneled roof flashing now and then like a camera.”

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Early on, Majumdar contextualizes the novel’s crisis within a history of famine under British imperial policies. She references black-and-white photos from 1943, “in which people appeared as sunken eyes and twig-thin limbs.” Focusing her viewfinder on affection, Majumdar depicts Boomba, Ma, and their families in “their fullness—their love, their humor, their annoyance, their preference.” Their affection may manifest as aggression, and Majumdar investigates the contradiction, finding that “the needs of others were always smaller than the needs of one’s own child.”

The book’s often unspoken moments of affection are familiar to me, given my Bengali upbringing, like how gold bangles belonging to Ma’s mother are “inseparable from Ma’s memories of holding her own mother’s hand.” One of the many pleasures of Majumdar’s prose is how she evokes Bangla’s rhythms, syntax, and playfulness in English. “Flowerflower,” Mishti demands for cauliflower, reflecting how Bengali speakers tend to repeat a word twice for emphasis. In an old notebook Dadu uses to write poetry, his script “folded and straightened like caterpillars upon a stem.” On Ma’s mother having outfitted the family home before her death, Dadu says, she “dusted off her hands and made her exit.”

A Guardian and a Thief takes place in the near future, yet its narration proceeds in the past tense. That choice carries all the sorrow of an affectionate gesture, an anticipatory mourning of a metropolis “possible nowhere but here,” as irreplaceable as a constellation, an heirloom house, or a mother.

BIO

Sumaiya Aftab Ahmed is a lawyer and writer in New York. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.