Megha Majumdar's new novel fulfills debut's promise
‘A Guardian and a Thief’ is a novel set in near-future, famine-stricken Kolkata that forces readers to question their own moral principles in times of crisis
The critics got it wrong. Many of the world’s leading literary commentators hailed Megha Majumdar’s debut A Burning (2020) as a propulsive thriller, a “brief, brave novel", as James Wood called it in The New Yorker. While A Burning has memorable characters such as Jivan, a young Muslim woman living in modern-day India with big dreams, who is shattered by an evil system, it often falters in voice and pace, and did seem like it was written for a non-Indian readership. But it is in her new novel, A Guardian and a Thief, that Majumdar comes into her own. It truly deserves all the hosannas she received from critics for her first, as it upends easy notions of right and wrong. It is one of the finest novels of the year, because it does a complex thing and it does it well—it shows us how we are all guardians, and we are all thieves.
In a 2020 interview, Majumdar, who worked as an editor for Catapult, said that when she read the drafts of her debut, she was always aware of moments when her attention would slip and she’d be tempted to pick up her phone to scroll, adding, “that feeling of boredom is devastating to a writer." To fine-tune her first novel, Majumdar (who was born and brought up in India, and has spent nearly two decades in the US) tried to tighten the slack. It is perhaps that fear that ensures that A Guardian and a Thief seldom flags in pace or vitality. Boring, this novel is not.
Set over the course of a week in Kolkata, in a “ruined year", it tells the story of Ma, Dadu and Misthi. To escape a Kolkata verging on famine, skewered by heat, where fresh food is scarce and seaweed aplenty, the family must leave for the US. Ma’s husband has secured “climate visas" for his family of three to ensure their safe passage to Ann Arbor. He is unable to return to India to fetch them, and they must make their way out before the airways shut. Their plans of escape are dashed when their passports are stolen by Boomba, a young man down and out on his luck, who was a resident of the shelter where Ma used to work as a manager.
While this is the basic outline of the plot, Majumdar creates a novel with the pace of a thriller, and the heart of a psalm. A Guardian and a Thief is an ode to love; between husband and wife, grandfather and granddaughter, elder brother and kid brother, children and parents, father and child, mother and child. It is a love that surpasses all others, a love that will snitch an orange from a hapless child and stow it for one’s grandchild. It is a love that questions moral principles, forcing the reader to ask what she would do in a similar crisis.
Majumdar’s skill lies in the authenticity of each of her characters, her acute observations and needle-sharp prose. In A Burning, while some of her characters rang true, others like Lovely the hijra spoke in a cadence that seldom seemed believable. In A Guardian and a Thief, the reader’s heart goes out to Ma (desperately trying to care for her family against all odds), Misthi (a two-year-old who is all misheard words and emotions), Boomba (struggling to make a life for himself and his family back in a drowning village) and Dadu (afraid of losing the only life he knows, but also aware that he must).
The relationship between person and city comes out especially poignantly through Dadu. As Majumdar writes, “This was the city he believed in, the city in which knowing somebody once was knowing them forever." A city is not just a location, it is a web of dependencies, from one’s neighbour to one’s rickshaw-wallah. During hardship these relationships are only magnified. Just like the characters in the novel, the city too is thief and guardian. It robs people like Boomba of his dreams, but also provides unexpected refuge.
To list the many ways in which Ma, Dadu and Boomba are both guardian and thief would be to give too much of the novel away. Suffice to say, pick up the novel to find out more.
While reading Majumdar’s novel one is reminded of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song. Like the Irish author’s Booker Prize-winning novel, A Guardian and a Thief pivots around the theme of a mother’s desperation to protect her family during a harrowing situation. Like Prophet Song, this novel too seems set in a future that is unnervingly familiar, and winds towards a devastating end, rattling the reader.
It is perhaps emblematic of the times that the most meaningful contemporary novels are those which deal with a burning planet, the movement of people and the human perseverance for hope. As Ma thinks to herself, “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."
Nandini Nair is associate director, New India Foundation, and a literary journalist.
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