Book: A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF
Author: Megha Majumdar
Published by: Hamish Hamilton
Price: Rs 699
Megha Majumdar’s book keeps you hooked. Written as tightly as a thriller, it makes the reader curious about what happens next. What appears to be a simple story of a family waiting to get out of an ecological crisis and move abroad turns into a layered narrative as obstacles emerge at every step. At times, it seems impossible that the journey will take place, the flight will take off, whether the visas would be in place. Soaked in the tumultuous heat of Calcutta, a dystopian famine, climate change, and societal collapse, the novel explores questions of hope amidst despair, the intricacies of human relationships, and a lingering nostalgia for a fast-changing city.
The story, set in near-future Calcutta, unfolds over a period of seven days in the form of dual narratives that run parallel, often intersecting with each other. One narrative belongs to Ma, the guardian, and the other to Boomba, the thief. Ma is the mother of the two-year-old Mishti, waiting to move out of India with her ageing father (Dadu) to join her husband in Michigan who has got almost everything ready to start their lives anew. However, the journey gets delayed owing to the loss of their passports due to a theft on one fateful night. The thief, Boomba, a young man from an impoverished background, steals Ma’s purse containing important immigration documents, setting off the central conflict. Ma, along with Dadu, scrambles to recover the stolen documents while Boomba gets more and more desperate to secure a roof for his family.
Boomba is juxtaposed against the character of Ma but soon it appears that both are two sides of the same coin — both are trying to save the lives and the livelihoods of their respective families. Initially, it seems like Ma is the real guardian, protecting her family fiercely. But we soon understand that both Ma and Boomba are guardians and thieves of some sort, leading to the subversion of fixed moral archetypes. The roles get reversed and the issues of ethics, legality, and morality crawl up. The questions that readers begin to ponder include: how far can one go to save one’s family? Who becomes the ‘thief’ and who becomes the ‘guardian’ when alternate struggles of hope and fear surface?
A Guardian and a Thief explores contemporary issues, such as food scarcity, migration, inequality, even though it is set in a futuristic setting. It enquires about the nature of the response of ordinary people when the system fails. The privileged attempt to escape a crisis but when the crisis is something as grave as climate change, even the privileged cannot go far despite their resources.
Majumdar writes in a controlled, economical style that nonetheless carries strong emotional resonances. In keeping with the unpredictable rhythm of the lives of its protagonists, the novel sways between urgency on one hand and stillness on the other. Majumdar employs a polyphonic narrative style wherein the storyline, although primarily following Ma and Boomba, occasionally shifts to include the perceptions of others — a neighbour, a boatman, a bystander — thereby giving the sense of a collective city consciousness, as if the city itself is a living organism. The author’s decision to include Bengali words and cadences preserves the authenticity of the local, shaping the dialogue’s realism.
A Guardian and a Thief opens up newer vistas of narrative craft, showing how ordinary people confront extraordinary crises while also revealing that the line between a guardian and a
thief is often only as thin as their circumstances.