A Guardian and a Thief, By Megha Majumdar. Knopf. 205 pp. $29
Megha Majumdar’s “A Guardian and a Thief” is such an anxious book that even when you finally put it down, you’ll hear it sitting there on the shelf, panting. A finalist for this year’s National Book Award in fiction, it’s a perfect short novel: 200 pages of tightly honed panic about life in a collapsing society.
Once again, Majumdar is back in Kolkata, India, the setting of her searing first novel, “A Burning,” which revolves around the firebombing of a passenger train. But this story opens, instead, with a burst of private optimism. In exactly one week, Ma will take her father, Dadu, and her 2-year-old daughter, Mishti, to America where her husband awaits. Just seven days until this deserving family can escape the deadly heat, corrupt government and gathering famine that have rendered the city impossible to endure.
Ma has carefully arranged every one of the thousands of details necessary to carry off her family’s transcontinental leap toward salvation. She’s resigned from her job at a local shelter and found the perfect replacement. She’s packed their suitcases and said “goodbye to this house, and to this kitchen, and to this stove.” All that remains is going to the American consulate and collecting their passports, “these divine documents” with their new “climate visas” – one of several subtle nods to the feverish future in which this story takes place.
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“She knew plenty about America,” Majumdar writes with her usual deadpan irony. “It was a country of breathable air and potable water, and, despite a history of attempts to cultivate a poorly educated electorate, functioning schools and tenacious thinkers. It was a country of encompassing hope, sustained by the people despite the peddlers of fear and pursuers of gain who wore the ill-fitting costumes of political representation. It was a country of opportunity for her child.”
To secure that precious opportunity, Ma must only survive the next seven days. “Extrication from one’s hometown was for the lucky,” she knows. “Her own luck dazzled her.”
But then on Day 2 – admit it, you knew trouble was coming – a young man named Boomba slips through an open window while Ma and her family are sleeping. Starving in a city gripped by famine, the thief grabs as much food as he can, fills Ma’s purse with raisins and cashews and flees into the night.
With the passports.
Now the fuse is lit. These tense chapters – labeled “Day 3,” “Day 4” and so on – burn with increasing ferocity. This is only nominally a story about thwarted travel plans. Majumdar’s real subject, as always, is moral culpability.
Like Chang-rae Lee’s dystopian novel “On Such a Full Sea” (2014), “A Guardian and a Thief” captures the anxiety of shrinking resources, the sense of precarity that makes the upper classes obsessed with securing their advantages in a world slipping away. (See billionaire Peter Thiel’s recent lament about how difficult it’s become “to hide one’s money.”) Yet at the same time, the book’s simple structure – its relentless movement through Ma’s seven days and the accumulation of disasters – feels reminiscent of a fairy tale, which helps account for the deep, visceral terror the story generates.
As the clock ticks down, Ma rushes to the police, to the consulate, to anyone who might be able to find, replace or even counterfeit new passports and visas, but she’s tearing through a labyrinth of unsympathetic bureaucracy – the soft tyranny of a society in decay. In a world running out of water, food, even breathable air, civil service has devolved into unbridled resentment. “Tit for tat,” a young woman tells Ma. “That’s the only justice we can have these days, don’t you think?”
But Majumdar will give our sympathies no stable resting place. She draws us deep into Boomba’s life, his thwarted ambitions, and the gross inequity that is a kind of quiet violence we’re conditioned to imagine is more tragic than criminal. Naturally, the thief has his own family to worry about: His parents and his little brother are starving under a tarp on the outskirts of town. Boomba knew to break into Ma’s house because he saw her stealing food from the shelter where she used to work.
As Ma rushes to regain her passports and Boomba struggles to exploit his advantage over her, the distinction between guardian and thief dissolves in Majumdar’s acidic insight. All these characters are experts at preserving their innocence. Ma realizes that “she had believed herself different, and differently fated.” Even gentle old Dadu clings to “his most dignified self, the one who rejected the idea that his daughter could steal from the shelter.”
Majumdar wants us to understand that they’re all guilty of that most human failing. “The needs of others were always smaller than the needs of one’s own child,” Dadu thinks. “Perhaps it was the strange distortion of the crisis, or perhaps it was simply human nature, that the pain of others was never as acute or compelling as one’s own pain.”
Ma sees that competition in much starker, more frightening terms: “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,” she thinks. “Hope wasn’t soft or tender. It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived.”
I haven’t felt so unnerved by a novel since reading Paul Lynch’s “Prophet Song,” which won the Booker Prize in 2023. Majumdar’s story may feel less terrifying than Lynch’s vision of our fascist future, but I fear hers is actually more ominous and more likely. “Prophet Song” – like Orwell’s “1984” – presumes ever stricter and more maniacal organization. Majumdar understands the way all the privations brought to a boil by rising temperatures could rend the moral bonds between individuals, setting everyone against everyone else in a desperate struggle for higher ground. The future, in other words, isn’t totalitarian; it’s chaos.
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Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”