Once, when I was going home on a crowded New York City subway around ten or eleven pm, I sat across from a young woman and her son who was about three years old. He was eating from a small bag of Cheetos the mother held open for him, and the orange dust from the cheesy squiggles stained his small, delicate fingers. The image stayed with me.

Megha Majumdar's magnificent short novel, A Guardian and A Thief, has many memorable scenes involving an adult providing food for a child. There is Dadu, the grandfather, stealing a cauliflower for his granddaughter, Mishti; Boomba, the crook, taking Mishti across the river to what is known as the billionaire's island, for a seat at a free banquet for any adult who brings a child. And there is the child herself, Mishti, eating the beloved vegetable she calls "flower flower," that her grandfather stole. After days when all she had were onions, her mouth is happy, fingers dripping with the oil the cauliflower was braised in.

The setting for the novel is Kolkata, India in a near future when a long period of drought and extreme heat have killed farm animals and withered crops, and most of the population in this teeming, chaotic city is hungry, while some, like Mishti's mother and grandfather, steal to feed their child, an activity that reveals the brilliant irony of the novel when a guardian and a thief are so often the same person. Dadu wanders the pathways of this colorful city, enjoying the rhythmic pulse of a place he loves. But the scarcity of food puts enormous pressure on Ma, Mishti's mother, through these last seven days before they leave forever to join Baba, Mishti's father, who is a new hire at the University of Michigan. In the small slice of time before their flight, one mishap after another bedevils Ma who must keep documents in order and the family fed.

Even as I felt the sobering parallels between Kolkata in a state of crisis and any other city in the next decade of what will most likely be worsening climate change, I fully enjoyed the novel's rhythmic, descriptive prose. It is a banquet for the senses, the pages shimmering with details that feed empathy: "His heart galloped like a hoofed animal given a field in his chest" (29), "At his mouth, a lit cigarette dimmed and flared"(105), "He ate slowly, yolk rich as loam on his tongue" (9), "Oil rolled down his chin, and he caught the drop with his forefinger and licked it" (116). These qualities balance the challenges the characters must face.

Boomba steals into the family's house one night when he notices an upper window ajar and climbs up a pipe to reach it.

"At the top, after a moment of relief he saw: The kitchen window was indeed open, but it had bars. Arms burning with effort, he tried what came to him. Was he skinny enough to--? Here was his body's deprivation coming to his aid. Here was hunger, his helper" (29).

When Boomba squeezes through the bars, thanks to his emaciated condition, he enters a sleeping house.

"In the dizzying dark... the kitchen smelled of eggs. With excitement that was difficult to distinguish from incomprehension, with fingers that folded and grasped in ways he didn't mean for them to, he looked in the fridge and on the shelves—nothing. He opened and shut cabinets that revealed only spice jars. Where were the eggs? His nose was sharp from days of protein bars and wrinkling apples at the shelter. He knew he had smelled eggs. And, more to the point, he had seen with his own eyes the manager stealing the eggs from the shelter's kitchen" (29).

The precise details of a mind and body in a state of desperation—fingers he can't control folding and grasping, torso doing what at first seemed impossible, sliding between bars on a window—allow me to feel Boomba's stealth while the family I know so well is sleeping, making me an accomplice to a thief who, at other times, like Ma, like Dadu, is also a guardian.

As the competition for food and shelter overrules everything else, Majumdar raises obvious moral questions, though the word is rarely invoked. My conclusion? If a writer wants to highlight a moral issue, this theme is most effective when it's neither didactic, nor even front and center, but instead rests within the images, sounds, and rhythms of prose that, in this novel, are busy delivering the full sensory experience of a once beloved place changing in such challenging and unpredictable ways the characters themselves are forced to change along with it.

Majumdar, Megha. A Guardian and a Thief. New York: Knopf, 2025.

Filed under: Addressing moral issues