I
have always gravitated toward Asian literature, drawn to its focus to interior
lives and its ability to connect the personal with the political. That pull
becomes even stronger when the setting is India, a place I’ve visited four
times in the past and where history, inequality, and survival often appears
more powerful on the page. Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief
arrives squarely within that scope, offering a speculative yet unsettlingly portrait
of a near-future Kolkata reshaped by climate catastrophe and moral compromise.
The
novel is set in a city besieged by heat, rising seas, and dried farmlands.
Famine is no longer a fear but a daily condition, food is scarce, and survival
is negotiated hour by hour. Against this backdrop, Majumdar follows a fractured
family: a wife, a daughter, and a grandfather left behind while the husband
pursues a desperate hope, petitioning them to the United States under a
so-called climate visa, one of the few remaining escape routes from
environmental collapse. The application itself becomes a kind of moral fault
line, exposing what families are willing to sacrifice for the promise of safety.
Interwoven
with this story is Boomba, a poor boy navigating the brutal realities of hunger
in the city. Like many of Kolkata’s residents, he is trapped in a system where
he sees survival as demanding constant calculation. Majumdar resists romanticizing
him; Boomba is neither a hero nor symbol of those who rises above it, but a street
smart and observant presence whose small decisions carry enormous weight. His
path collides sometimes indirectly, sometimes violently, with those of the more
powerful figures who comprises the narrative.
Among
them is a billionaire whose philanthropic gestures loom large over the city.
Majumdar’s portrayal of wealth and goodwill is pointed. The charity on display
is lavish, visible, and carefully staged, yet it leaves the structures of
poverty intact. Reading this, it is difficult not to draw parallels with the
familiar spectacle of political dole-outs we have here in the Philippines.
Politicians with performative generosity that consolidate power rather than
redistribute it, that attempts to clean their consciences without altering
lives. In A Guardian and a Thief, aid becomes another form of control,
administered selectively and strategically, reinforcing dependence rather than
dignity.
Majumdar
writes with precision, allowing the novel’s speculative elements never
overwhelm its emotional core. This is not a story about climate change as a direct
future threat, but about how environmental collapse sharpens existing
inequalities and forces ordinary people into desperation.
The
ending is devastating. There is no neat resolution, no moral accounting that cleans
up the chaos the novel has so carefully constructed. Instead, the book closes
on a moment that feels unfinished, leaving the reader suspended in uncertainty.
When I turned the final page, I sat in stillness for several minutes, imagining
the lives continuing beyond the frame of the story, wondering what survival
might look like next.
It
is the kind of non-closure that remains, inviting interpretation rather than
offering comfort and one that suggests the possibility of a sequel, or at least
demands the reader to imagine what comes after.
As
a first encounter with Megha Majumdar’s work, A Guardian and a Thief is both
bracing and persuasive. It had about to seek out her debut novel, A
Burning, with the expectation that this is a writer who has no inhibitions
at looking at the fault lines of modern life and to leave them unresolved.
Rating: ★★★ and 1/2
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