Review of A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

I can't stop thinking about this fascinating near-future climate-change story of desperation, loyalty, and determination in Kolkata, India, and how a tiny bit of empathy might have unraveled the increasingly devastating whirlwind of conflict between the two main protagonists, who are each both hero and villain.

It was her duty, as a guardian, to put into action the beautiful ideal of hope.

Ma thought harshly: This was what it looked like. Hope for the future was no shy bloom but a blood-maddened creature, fanged and toothed.... Hope wasn't soft or tender. It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived.

In a near-future Kolkata, India, Ma is the manager of a food pantry for those in need. She's days away from bringing her daughter and aging father to meet her husband in Michigan. But the famine is devastating in Kolkata, and Ma has been skimming food supplies for her own household. She justifies this to herself as a temporary measure before her departure.

But a desperate client of the food pantry has noticed her theft and becomes determined to strike back. And by happenstance, this revenge also threatens Ma's family's ability to travel to a land of plenty.

Majumdar twists the situation between thief and mother, continually shifting the reader's loyalties as each character makes decisions that spin off into increasingly destructive consequences. The more each digs in--bitter, resentful, greedy, desperate--the worse each of their situations become.

If they were for a moment patient with one another, or generous, or empathetic, the course of the story could divert from its disastrous course. It feels as though Majumdar tempts us at key points with a shimmer of hope that a revolutionary understanding could bloom between our two main protagonists.

The thief comes from devastating poverty and has clawed for survival and in hopes of helping his family. The mother has taken from others to preserve her daughter's life and her own. Hero and villain roles are too muddied to set one character above the other; both are grasping at the other's expense, and each is unwilling to concede, instead increasing the fervor with which they battle the other.

"...What have you done with your life?"

If his mother had voice left in her, she would have said that she had kept a home and raised a son whose words, now punishing, were, after all, fulfillment. Here was her son, capable of battling his mother--and so capable of fighting his way in the world all alone, as he would have to do one day. This was the destructive attainment of a mother's life's work.

As the time for departure from India nears for Ma, her elderly father, and her small daughter, a few elements slot into place and offer hope before Ma realizes that none of it matters and that the future she imagined is compromised, possibly for good. It felt conceivable that an unorthodox melding of priorities and futures could occur between the warring parties, so that they could coexist in a fashion. But their cemented roles in the escalating the conflict ensure that the situation comes to a disastrous head.

Ultimately, the main protagonists' roles shift yet again, so that "guardian" and "thief" labels are muddied, characters' histories (and, in one case, even a name) are lost forever, and death shakes the interwoven parties to their cores.

Solo men like him were suspect entities. But a man accompanying a child--such a man was a different species. In the eyes of others, such a man was the most kingly of beings, a guardian.

I can't stop thinking about this book and the mirror it holds to a reader, forcing an uncomfortable examination of excess, generosity, empathy, loyalty, but also greed, grasping, scarcity, and, in the end, encouraging a critical look at what we feel is our duty to one other in this world.

This was stressful, often claustrophobic, and fascinating.

I received a prepublication version of this title courtesy of NetGalley and Knopf.

Another Title from Megha Majumdar

Megha Majumdar is also the author of A Burning.

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