The title characters of Megha Majumdar’s second novel are a young man referred to only by a nickname, Boomba, and a woman known as Ma. Each regards themselves as a guardian, and the other as a thief. The reader is not asked to take sides, but instead to observe how the world makes thieves of guardians, and vice versa.
A Guardian and a Thief takes place over what is meant to be the last week of Ma living in Kolkata. She, her father and her two-year-old daughter are about to join Ma’s husband in the United States, as the recipients of prized “climate visas”. Floods and extreme heat have turned Kolkata into a city of persistent food shortages. Black marketeers hoard eggs, fruit and vegetables, while fish, previously the cornerstone of Bengali cooking, has vanished altogether. The terrifying word famine is disinterred. This is one of the many ways in which climate change has sent Kolkata forward into the past. While Majumdar’s acclaimed debut, A Burning, laid out the appalling consequences of a young woman’s Facebook post, in A Guardian and a Thief the city appears to be almost entirely smartphone-free.
For years, Ma, who sincerely believes herself to be an honest and altruistic person, has got away with stealing food from the homeless shelter that she manages. She has, after all, an old father and an infant daughter to take care of – if she is a thief, it is only because she is a guardian. But then, just as she is about to leave Kolkata behind, a new shelter resident who has observed her theft breaks into her house. Boomba takes not only the stolen food, but her purse, which contains her family’s passports and the climate visas that will open the gates of America.
Majumdar writes what Martin Amis dubbed “vow-of-poverty prose”, although in her case it might more accurately be called vow-of-efficiency. This means the eradication of semicolons, run-on-sentences, wordplay and digression; a faultlessly clear third-person voice that dispenses with free indirect style; and a truly minimal degree of social and historical context. All these things are sacrificed for narrative focus.
There are costs to taking efficiency to this ascetic extent. A Guardian and a Thief has the pace of a thriller, but it derives its drama from the ratcheting up of moral stakes, rather than suspense. By abjuring so many of the novel’s traditional tools, Majumdar can make her choice of form seem arbitrary, raising the question of why this is a novel at all, and not a play or film. Although concerned with moral ambiguity, it seeks at all times to be narratively unambiguous, and to signpost and repeat its ideas for the inattentive reader, just as TV writers are now encouraged to do.
But plenty is gained, too. By offering as little cultural and historical exposition as possible, Majumdar evades the narrative clunkiness that inevitably attends attempts to explain India to the west. This frees her up not only to tell a story of universal moral interest, but also to deliver a perceptive account of specifically Indian anxieties. She brilliantly renders the helplessness that even privileged Indians feel in the face of western consular officials; the extent to which Indians divided by class simply cannot understand each other; and, above all, how the Indian rich use the claims of family as a justification for riding roughshod over everyone else.
If the novel works best as (Indian) moral critique, it is less successful as climate fiction. By structuring the plot around the accidental theft of the family’s passports, Majumdar, at two crucial moments, is compelled to stretch plausibility too far. In both cases, for narrative reasons a character displays a degree of unworldliness that is inconsistent with everything else we know about them, and with what we might reasonably expect of someone in their position.
First, Boomba – a young man who has worked for years in the big city – is ignorant of the very existence of passports. When he finds them, he fans himself with one “to see if it served a cooling purpose”. Later, Ma goes to a forger in an attempt to substitute fake passports for the ones that Boomba has stolen. This could, perhaps, be explained by desperation. Boomba’s moment of unworldliness, however, cannot be satisfactorily accounted for.
At a pinch, a reader might accept or at any rate pass over these moments. What is harder to accept is the idea that the US, in a world in which large parts of Earth are uninhabitable, might hand out “climate visas” at all. The book pits “some Americans” who are outraged by climate immigration against “other Americans” who welcome it; the implication is that climate visas will be handed out by some presidents and not others. A Guardian and a Thief dramatises, to superb effect, the Indian elite’s great fear: a world in which they are forced to share. The west’s fear of uncontrolled climate immigration, by contrast, is not only not dramatised but trivialised as the concerns of “some”. Those “other Americans” will find here a novel to engage their sympathies, but not trouble their sleep.
• A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar is published by Scribner (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
