When Scarcity Blurs the Line Between Right and Wrong
Megha Majumdar’s second novel imagines how climate disaster might scramble our sense of morality.
Whenever I read a novel about immigration, I recall a scene from the 2006 Italian film Nuovomondo (released as Golden Door in English). At the turn of the 20th century, a young Sicilian woman who will soon marry a “rich American” presents two postcards, supposedly from the United States, to a village elder. The first depicts a man holding a wheelbarrow that contains a massive onion, so large that it dwarfs both the wheelbarrow and the man. The second postcard displays a tree that is bursting with coins, as if money is sprouting from the branches. Convinced that these images faithfully represent America, a group of villagers sets off for the New World.Many immigrant novels contain similar scenes, in which hapless characters embrace improbable visions of America, only to be chastened upon arrival. These passages reflect how divided the planet once was, how easily myths about the United States could become rooted in other countries. Yet these images also contained a kernel of truth: America once seemed to be a place where hard work inevitably yielded prosperity; where, with time and effort, you could eventually purchase as many onions as you pleased.Immigration tales tend to adopt a hybrid form—part elegy for life in the home country, part hymn to the promise of the new. A Guardian and a Thief is not an immigrant novel in the traditional sense, though its protagonist hopes to leave India for America. (Majumdar’s best-selling debut novel, A Burning, takes place in contemporary India.) Set in the near future, when an environmental crisis has decimated India’s economy and landscape, A Guardian and a Thief unfolds as a mesmerizing morality play that demonstrates how categories like “victim” and “thief” collapse under conditions of scarcity. Yet the novel suffers from what feels like a mismatch between the conditions it depicts and the worldview of the people who populate it. Majumdar’s characters are contending with intractable 21st-century problems while adhering to the stories of an earlier era. In a novel that is so alert to where climate change is leading the world, a narrative frame that illustrates migration as linear and largely redemptive feels anachronistic.[Read: A new kind of immigrant novel]A Guardian and a Thief begins promisingly, offering nuanced portraits of its main characters. On the first page, the reader meets Ma as she fetches eggs and rice from a hidden room in her home. Standing before the stove, she watches a young man whistling as he cycles past her house. Majumdar continues:
Thief, thought Ma. Who else but a person who had chanced upon fresh vegetables or fruit would wander the city of Kolkata in this ruined year, the heat a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one’s head, and recall a song?
But the reader soon learns that Ma, who manages a homeless shelter, has for the past year been skimming donations for her own family as food grows scarcer in Kolkata. Soon after, a desperate man named Boomba, who witnessed Ma stealing from the shelter, breaks into her home and swipes her food, her phone, and a purse containing her family’s invaluable travel documents.Throughout the book, Majumdar provides devastating details about Ma’s and Boomba’s lives. Ma cares for her young daughter and elderly father, and has gone months without seeing her husband, who is waiting for her in the U.S. Boomba’s family, in a nearby village, has endured a series of catastrophes, leaving them in dire straits. Ma and Boomba desire the same things—love, food, shelter, security—and they are fearless and unapologetic in pursuing them. Each comes to understand that the rules that prevailed during calmer times no longer hold, that to cling to them is to willingly accept privation and defeat. Majumdar lavishes her characters with careful attention, and so the reader comes to regard their most troubling actions as justified, if not inevitable. And because the world she conjures is so similar to our own (her characters complain about economic inequality and have smartphones; among them is a social-media influencer with 600,000 followers), a persistent question pulses beneath the story: What would you do if you were in their shoes?In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Majumdar said that her novel was prompted by asking herself: “Are there good people and monsters or do we contain elements of both?” This idea animates every encounter between Ma and Boomba until the distinction between good and bad, right and wrong, begins to dissolve. Ma imagines herself as a guardian—of her daughter, her father, her fragile home—yet she steals from the shelter she manages. Boomba, young and rootless, takes essential provisions from Ma’s family, yet his act is also one of guardianship, because he does so to secure his own family’s survival. The novel offers no clean resolutions; it shows how scarcity makes every action double-edged.Majumdar’s psychological precision is what makes the novel’s geopolitical weaknesses feel so pronounced. Her depiction of everyday human interaction is rich and persuasive, but the larger world her characters inhabit feels underdeveloped. Ma’s vision of the U.S., for instance, is described in these clichéd terms:
She knew plenty about America. Who didn’t, given Hollywood? It was a country of grocery stores as large as aircraft hangars, stocked with waxed fruit and misted vegetables and canned legumes from floor to ceiling. It was a country of breathable air and potable water, and, despite a history of attempts to cultivate a poorly educated electorate, functioning schools and tenacious thinkers. It was a country of encompassing hope, sustained by the people despite the peddlers of fear and pursuers of gain who wore the ill-fitting costumes of political representation.
Ma’s assertion that she knows plenty about America “given Hollywood” might have been understandable in an earlier era, before the internet was ubiquitous. But Majumdar has created a world that is recognizably continuous with our own—her characters scan social media and inhabit a culture saturated with real-time information; as a result, this statement feels curiously old-fashioned. Ma’s description of enormous, glistening grocery stores could be explained as the musings of a person who longs for stability and plentitude, or of a naive character who thinks of America as a land of boundless riches. But Ma has been deftly drawn as a canny realist and problem solver—not the kind of person to indulge in daydreams.[Read: No one is prepared for a new era of global migration]Majumdar’s inconsistent world building ultimately undermines the reader’s ability to invest in the story. She reveals that crops have failed and hunger grips India, but the scope and texture of the climate crisis remain unclear. At one point, Ma’s husband does provide a glimpse of how the climate crisis has affected the U.S. (“fields of corn, cucumber, and asparagus withering, rivers depleted, cacti where there had once been broad-leafed trees”). Yet its brevity is telling: This is the sum of Majumdar’s engagement with the international scale of the disaster. The vagueness might be deliberate—an attempt to present the story as a parable about morality under duress. But invoking climate change invites readers to think in global terms. Without that examination, the moral argument becomes unmoored. A novel about planetary collapse retreats into the contours of a fable, one that asks what people will do to survive without fully confronting the systems that endanger them.Majumdar’s most compelling insight—into collapsing social categories during a time of crisis—speaks to a broader global condition, in which the will to survive can obscure the line between right and wrong. Yet the novel also shows that moral imagination cannot thrive in isolation. Majumdar’s characters’ choices would carry greater weight if the conditions constraining them were rendered with equal depth. In the end, A Guardian and a Thief is a story that comprehends hunger more deeply than the world that produces it.
