A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

Before discussing this book, let’s take a short detour into the nuances of grammar. I promise this is going somewhere.

In English, there is an important difference between “a,” an indefinite article, and “the,” which is definite. “A giraffe” could refer to any of the long-necked, spotted animals, while “the giraffe” indicates a specific one.

When you stack together multiple articles and nouns, the shades of meaning can get murkier. In essayist Janet Malcolm’s famous takedown of the journalism profession, The Journalist and the Murderer, in which she likens reporters to con men, the title clearly refers to two distinct people. Had she called the book A Journalist and a Murderer, it would have raised an immediate question: Are these two different individuals? Or perhaps they are one and the same.

Megha Majumdar, a New York-based novelist born in India, plays with this ambiguity in A Guardian and a Thief, set in a near-future, hunger-ravaged Kolkata after a climate catastrophe. The main characters are Ma, a mother trying to flee to America with her family, and Boomba, a desperate young man who leaves his flooded village to try to provide for his long-suffering parents and baby brother. Under ordinary circumstances, Ma and Boomba would never cross paths. But in this grim new reality, they barrel into one another. As the title suggests, both are guardians; they are also both thieves.

We meet Ma as she is preparing to fly to Michigan with her two-year-old daughter, Mishti, and her elderly father, Dadu, to reunite with her husband, who is anxiously awaiting their arrival and has a comfortable apartment awaiting them. Ma has already quit her job managing a shelter for homeless families, where she had been quietly pilfering donations of eggs and other coveted items. As the book warns us a bit heavy-handedly, she only needs to make her family’s dwindling food stock last another seven days. That plan is thrown into chaos when Boomba, a witness to Ma's theft, hatches a scheme to break into her house and steal supplies for himself.

The plot unfolds with a sense of doom. I doubt this was Majumdar’s intention, but her use of the seven-day timeline immediately brought to mind the period it took God to create the world in the Bible. In contrast, seven days in this book is enough time to both build and destroy one’s own universe.

A Guardian and a Thief is set in a near-future, hunger-ravaged India.

There’s a particularly haunting passage when Dadu steals an orange from a small boy to bring home to the hungry Mishti. The child shrieks and watches helplessly as Dadu devours a piece of the fruit in front of him and walks away with what's left. Dadu is ashamed and knows that Mishti does not deserve this food any more than the boy, but it is clear he would make the same choice again. He, too, is transformed into both a guardian and a thief.

I had a few frustrations with this book. After she is robbed, Ma deduces a bit too easily that Boomba is the culprit. This discovery helps move the plot along, but it’s not believable that she would have investigative abilities that are quite so sharp. Similarly, the toddler Mishti’s ability to speak in complete sentences did not ring true for a child that age. I found her dialogue to be implausible and a distraction.

Despite these flaws, this book explores dystopian themes and moral dilemmas through a propulsive narrative, and the final pages deliver a devastating blow I did not see coming.