Megha Majumdar says ‘A Guardian and a Thief’ explores how we act in a crisis

The title of “A Guardian and a Thief” refers to two different characters, but the terms apply to both: A mother named Ma prepares to flee the scorching Indian city of Kolkata with her toddler and father to join her husband in America, while Boomba, who has fled rural India, forges a new life amidst the relative opportunity of Kolkata.

Both are guardians, both are thieves. 

Megha Majumdar, author of the bestseller, “A Burning,” sets her National Book Award-nominated novel in a near future where the climate crisis has made even shade a commodity and food is so scarce that stealing or hoarding seems like an outsized crime against one’s community.

It’s not so far-fetched: There are real-world reports of heatwave deaths in India as well as the toll that extreme heat is taking on women trying to manage their families’ safety. The novel captures those stresses and how every decision seems to have outsized consequences, forcing people to choose between their sense of morality and quest for survival.

Ma has been working at a shelter – one where Boomba lands after various misfortunes — running it both well and compassionately, but she also has to make sure her daughter gets fed. “That she had, in the past year, with the increasing scarcity of food, been quietly taking from the shelter’s donations did not erase nor taint how deeply she felt for the shelter’s residents.”

The slender but powerful book takes place over the course of a week, when Ma’s plans are suddenly imperiled while Boomba seizes the chance to make up for his past mistakes and help his family. Their lives are on a collision course in which tragedy seems inevitable. 

Majumdar, who was raised in Kolkata before attending Harvard and Johns Hopkins, spoke recently by phone from her Brooklyn home about the novel, its themes and her approach to writing. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. How much does it erode the soul to have to calculate each day about whether to share limited water or steal food from a child for your own family? 

That is the question of the book. What does that do to your humanity and to your soul to have to make those calculations? Is it an erosion of who you are? Is it an exposure toward who you are? Those are the really murky questions that I was interested in. 

Q. Is this book about individual tragedies or about what happens when individual people get crushed by global forces like climate change and extreme inequality?

I am very interested in how people operate and what their freedom looks like when they are caught in systems that are much bigger than them. What is free will for a person when they are living in a network which is much bigger than them – what happens when food supply chains break down, what happens when migration becomes a subject of huge political friction? I’m glad you bring up the question of systems and individuals, because one of the things that I think a novel can do really beautifully is encourage a reader to confront what it looks like to live within a system.

Q. Did writing about these characters compromising their values come from a sense of cynicism about humanity or would you argue that this is just reality?

When I write, I wonder how people will behave when such a crisis is upon us. I think that we will probably be incredibly generous at times. I think we will be good neighbors and good residents of our city, and help others when we can. But I think there will also be moments where we act very selfishly and perhaps viciously. So what I’m trying to arrive at is something that feels true.

Q. Were you thinking, “I want my characters to do these things to reflect those dilemmas,” or did this come out of what the characters organically were doing? How much do you control your characters? 

Building characters has a bit to do with it, where I think about the questions that interest me, the areas of moral life that interest me. How do I approach the sacrifices that I believe people might make in a time of scarcity and crisis? But part of it is more mysterious, as you’re saying: I was on a panel very recently with Jonas Hassen Khemiri, who wrote “The Sisters,” and he spoke about allowing his characters to teach him who they are and what the book needs to be, and that really resonated with me. That’s the mysterious place of allowing the characters to be alive and fully themselves on the page and of listening to what they’re saying. 

Q. You’re a concise writer. Are you conscious of that when you’re writing? Or is that part of the editing?

I tend to write very compressed pages. That is just my inclination as a writer. I write very short.

I love books which are tightly plotted, where every scene and every page feels like it belongs. 

I want to give the reader clarity in terms of understanding why I am asking them to read a scene. And I think that perhaps leads to a kind of even greater compression than what I start out with. Because I write in a very compressed way, but that doesn’t mean that the early drafts are as precise as I would want them to be. I can still write pages which are really clumsy and compressed.

So part of the work is to go over those failures of language and those places where I’m saying something unclear and to chisel away until I arrive at something which feels much more precise. Precision is a kind of beauty in fiction. And that’s the kind of beauty that I’m aiming for.

Q. Yet you’ll veer away from the main characters briefly. There’s a line, “Those teenagers shrieked because they were coming to know their own voices. No crisis could contain their glee.” That captures a lot in so few words, but it’s separate from the story. 

Painting a picture of the city was part of my ambition for the book, and not just as this climate change-wrecked, devastated city. I wanted to show that it is a city where so much life is going on. There is still a place for delight and humor. And that felt really important to me, to show that the energy of the people is not defeated.

Q. As a new parent was it difficult to write about children suffering and enduring loss?

Conjuring characters is a work of both putting emotional truth into a character and imagining pressure placed upon the characters, which far exceeds what I have gone through. It’s drawing from my experience and imagining what I have not experienced. But even if the question is difficult or the subject matter is grim, there is a kind of fundamental pleasure in thinking about those things. It’s what draws me to the page.