Hope snarled | Review of Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief

New York-based Megha Majumdar sets her 2nd novel, A Guardian and a Thief, a National Book Award finalist and an Oprah Book Club pick, successful Kolkata of the future. But the city’s present-day denizens, battling uncharacteristic heat, predominant storms and catastrophic rains brought connected by planetary warming, whitethorn consciousness that they are already surviving done it.

Writers similar Amitav Ghosh person chronicled “monsters” successful the garb of utmost events successful their books. In The Hungry Tide (2004), the concluding pages picture a cyclone which sends a large partition of h2o surging done the mangrove forests successful the Sundarbans. Climate disasters person upended lives, resulting successful waves of migration.

Majumdar imagines the carnal fearfulness of surviving done specified acute discomfort, “the prima a pistol against one’s head”, and the consequences thereof, similar drought, floods and hunger. As the city, rife with corruption, weeps for a “handful of thing to eat”, Majumdar introduces readers to her 2 sets of protagonists, connected either broadside of the people divide, 1 with resources, 1 without.

Dadu, his girl Ma and granddaughter Mishti are leaving the metropolis successful 7 days to articulation the child’s begetter successful Ann Arbor, Michigan, wherever helium has accepted a probe presumption connected mosquito-borne diseases astatine a laboratory. After rounds of exhausting paperwork, convincing bureaucrats of his usefulness to America, helium yet manages to get clime visas for his family. But erstwhile we are told, “All Ma needed to bash was past these 7 days”, it ominously portends the happenings that volition unfold implicit a week.

Shifting rights and wrongs

Ma and Dadu instrumentality their guardianship of Mishti precise seriously. Ma has routinely pilfered from donations made to the structure wherever she utilized to enactment earlier quitting for the impending travel to America; Dadu cannot judge his granddaughter is going bare successful his beloved city, and doesn’t deliberation doubly earlier snatching an orangish from a boy. After all, the symptom of others is ne'er arsenic “acute oregon compelling arsenic one’s ain pain”. But idiosyncratic knows astir Ma’s secret, and thereby hangs a communicative of motivation ambiguity, fate, exile, home, emotion and loss.

Boomba had moved into the structure aft helium landed successful the metropolis from his colony successful hunt of work. Feeling liable for his mediocre family, and a brother, Robi, whom helium adores, helium is looking for ways to find a location for them, erstwhile helium witnesses Ma squirrelling distant nuts, raisins, atom and lentils. Majumdar, similar successful her debut novel, A Burning, examines quality quality successful its extremity. How bash radical behave nether pressure, successful times of desperation and acute hunger? Where is their motivation centre? Do ideas of close and incorrect shift? What does emotion oregon anticipation look like? Aren’t Ma and Boomba some guardians and thieves? Like Ma, Boomba’s motivation compass points toward the northbound of his ain household — helium is “no monster”.

Of leaving home

It is Ma’s duty, arsenic a guardian, “to enactment into enactment the beauteous perfect of hope”. But wherever is hope? Ma thinks harshly, possibly echoing struggling, bare mothers astir the world. “Hope for the aboriginal was nary shy bloom but a blood-maddened creature, fanged and toothed, with its ain cognition of history’s hostilities and the cages of the present. Hope wasn’t brushed oregon tender. It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived.”

In a metropolis afloat of contradictions, the situation is simply a leveller of sorts, but there’s nary examination betwixt what the affluent endure and what the mediocre endure. Majumdar’s descriptions of Ma’s beingness and location are transportation perfect, but she comes up a tad abbreviated portion penning astir Boomba and his family, peculiarly their colony experiences. That’s a insignificant quibble successful a publication that puts motivation dilemmas nether the scanner successful specified terrifying fashion.

It’s possibly not amiss to privation that Majumdar, who was calved successful Kolkata and moved to the U.S. for her studies, writes astir the migrant acquisition someday successful the future. In this book, she devotes a brilliant, tiny section connected Mishti’s father’s America. For Baba, the pridefulness of having immigrated is also, successful truth, the wound. And helium wants each accidental to analyse the wound, ever looking for an accidental to talk astir the location helium has near behind.

sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in

A Guardian and a Thief

Megha Majumdar

Hamish Hamilton

₹699