Knopf
Review by Walter Cummins
A Guardian and a Thief is chaotic novel, filled with surprising turns and ironic shifts, with characters whose plans constantly backfire, causing accidental but often grave violence, and with both planned and spontaneous deceptions. People try to be in charge of their lives but fail as hard as they try. Even when they achieve a goal, it’s at an unhappy price that in great part is a defeat.
In the first part of the novel the happenings are based on misunderstandings that could be the stuff of comedy. Characters make mistakes with disorienting consequences, but while inconvenienced, nobody gets seriously hurt. Then the results turn ominous and literally painful, matters of life and death. People who were at the edge of amusing as they blundered along become truly hurt as the stakes reveal a grim potential.
From the beginning the characters are desperate for food, even if they possess some funds. The store shelves are empty, with almost nothing to buy even if they could pay for it. They are painfully hungry, groveling for basic nourishment even if they have homes. Those with leaky roofs, packed into crowded rooms, or left homeless from destructive storms have it even worse, famished in unbearably hot weather.
The city of Kolkata and nearby villages exist in a “ruined year” of climate calamity, fields barren, crops destroyed by pests and drought, villages flooded, “the sun a pistol against one’s head.” The novel opens with Ma fearing that a man on a bicycle on the road outside is a thief, mainly because she has a hidden storeroom with rice and eggs stolen from donations to a local shelter where she works. That’s the first irony, a self-deceived thief who does not admit that designation worrying about someone who might be a potential thief of the same goods.
Ma, whose given name is never revealed, lives in a comfortable air-conditioned house with her elderly father, Dadu, and her two-year-old daughter, Mishti, a bright and appealing verbal child. Ma’s husband, Badu, is in the United States, working at a laboratory in Ann Arbor, Michigan, researching mosquito-borne diseases. Ma, who never tells him what is really going on during their brief phone conversation, is about to join him in a week, along with Mishti and Dadu. “All Ma needed to do was survive these seven days.” The novel’s chapters are titled by each of those seven days as matters become more and more complicated.
Ma was right. The feared man the bicycle does turn out to be a robber, scrawny twenty-year-old named Boomba, thin enough to squeeze through the bars meant to bar entry by a window inadvertently left open by Ma. That’s the first of many mistakes made by all of the characters. Boomba escapes with food and Ma’s purse that contained the family’s passports, which he considers worthless and tosses onto a garbage heap.
How is Ma going to get new passports in time for her flight? She does not reveal her dilemma to Babu but gets Boomba to show her the heap in exchange for her promising to give him the house for his parents and little brother once her family is gone. At this point, the novel becomes darker, as indicated by the scene of Ma searching the garbage, Boomba having abandoned her:
After an hour of scouring, Ma paused and considered the slime and smear on her fingers. She thought of how Dadu would have felt, watching her searching in a heap of garbage like a mean-eyed bird. She had cast all dignity away, her clothes drenched, her hair pasted to her neck, reduced to naked need, and yet her need was the need of a lucky one. She was not yet the man who slid down the slope, a filthy cabbage in the crook of his elbow like a baby.
A further destructive scene takes place when a billionaire throws an open house to celebrate her daughter’s wedding on the luxurious floating Hexagon she had constructed on the city’s river, reachable only by boat. The woman invites the hungry with children to the fete. They pile onto crowded ferries. Boomba takes, effectively kidnaps, Mishti to have the required child. Once the initial feeding is completed, the packed visitors are incited to riot for more food and whatever luxuries they can grab. It’s a wild melee, people—many thieves—breaking down doors to steal food and medicine.
The billionaire orders guards to fire over the head of the crowd to calm them, but they rush back to the ferry. While this is happening, a friend of Boomba’s seizes a loudspeaker to proclaim, “Remember this day, madam, as a demonstration of what happens when you hoard food and give us crumbs. This is what happens when you hoard medicines while our children are dying. This feast is nothing but an insult to the people of the city. No more! No more!”
Even worse, the packed ferry, unbalanced, capsizes, plunging hundreds into the water. Boomba seizes Mishti and abandons the sack of rice he has stolen to swim the soaked child back to land. From here on matters in the city get even worse, especially for both Boomba’s and Ma’s family. A slight hint of hope may be found in the love of children, two beings who survive.
Ultimately, everything for everyone, for all their effort, goes painfully out of control. That’s for the characters. Megha Majumdar, as author, knows exactly what she is doing in the writing of this novel and shaping the chaos. She has created a unique and special work.
