A Guardian and a Thief
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Megha Majumdar on A Guardian and a Thief
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
When a UN report became a childhood memoryThe book began not with a character or a plot, but with a UN IPCC report stating that since 1950, Kolkata has recorded the highest increase in mean temperature of any major city surveyed. The statistic pulled Majumdar back to something she already knew in her body.
Reading about climate change in Kolkata made me curious about what the lived experience of it might be. I had memories of very hot days growing up, walking outside in a heat wave and my shoes sticking to the melting tar of the road.
Surveying the existing body of climate fiction, Majumdar kept running into a particular emotional instruction: be hopeful. The repetition started to feel like a failure of imagination rather than a balm, and she began asking what hope actually looks like when survival is at stake at the level of a single family rather than a civilization.
I grew interested in the complexity of hope in a time of crisis, not on the scale of nations or systems, but in the life of a person. What if, in the context of an unstable world, hope becomes morally impure, sly, vicious? When an adult steals an orange from a child to feed their own child, is that an erosion of their humanity or the most uninhibited expression of who they are?
For years the novel’s protagonist was a child of eleven wandering a climate-stricken Kolkata in search of food. That version wouldn’t cohere. Then, in 2021, Majumdar had a son, and the question that had been eluding her arrived from a different angle entirely: who was this child’s mother, and what would she do?
Before that I was really struggling with the book. I had a different plot. I was trying to make these characters work. And when I had my child and felt that ferocity of love, a whole new chamber of love opened up.
Majumdar left Kolkata at 19 and has not returned to live there. That distance shapes the novel’s treatment of the city: she is writing about a place she carries as memory and loss simultaneously.
Leaving behind your hometown is a wound. My parents still live in Kolkata, my extended family is there. I think I left behind a self that I could have been there. So the understanding of migration as composed of both pride and meaning, and also injury and sorrow, felt important for this book.
How she wrote it
Six years of wrong turns and one right numberThe six-year writing period was not one sustained build. It was a sequence of discarded attempts: pages about a hotel robbery, a vertical farm, a friend character who never made it through. The drafts that failed outnumbered the drafts that survived.
It was a lot of failed drafts, failed directions, failed characters, and a lot of rewriting and revising over the course of 6 years. Now I feel that every moment of failure lit the path here.
One of the most consequential structural decisions was recognizing that Boomba, the novel’s thief, could not remain a disruptive intruder in another character’s story. Majumdar describes her own resistance to this realization, because it meant taking on a much harder piece of writing.
I was so dismayed when I realized I had to write this character because for a long time I thought the novel would be about the middle-class family and there would be this thief who comes in and disrupts their lives. But then I realized that if I did that, you would have a hero and a villain, and that’s very boring. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel unfolds across seven days, a compression that took years to find. Majumdar had mapped alternative structures in spreadsheets, including a version that stretched across ten days, and none of them held the pressure she wanted.
When I finally landed on seven days, it was so satisfying. It sounds incredibly obvious now, but it was hidden from me for quite a while.
Research for the novel’s climate texture centered on food rather than temperature data. Majumdar found that most climate writing focused on water, but food felt closer to how her family experiences connection. She read about soil degradation, pests migrating into new regions, and women in Southern India who dive for seaweed, then asked whether seaweed might become a direct food source in a hungrier future. That question surfaces in the novel’s markets and meals.
Compression is exciting to me. I love putting pressure on my words and sentences to prove themselves. A novel is a claim on a reader’s time, and I take that claim seriously.
That same pressure governed revision. She described the work to OCRegister as chiseling through clumsy early pages until something more precise emerged, calling precision itself a kind of beauty in fiction.
The personal thread
A self left behind in KolkataWhen Poets & Writers asked what the most challenging thing about writing the novel was, Majumdar’s answer was not a technical problem of plot or structure. It named something more uncomfortable.
Facing my own failures on the page.
The novel’s two unnamed central characters, referred to throughout as Ma and Dadu, were always intended as placeholders. Majumdar assumed she would supply real names in a later draft. When she tried, the new names felt wrong every time, and she kept the relational ones. The logic she settled on connects to how the toddler Mishti, around whose needs the book’s action turns, would actually perceive the adults in her life.
Your hope for yourself and your own family…what do you do when that is not aligned with the hope of the collective? What do you do when those hopes begin to splinter and what is good for you is not good for your neighbor?
What she wants us to sit with
Hope as a force that makes us strangers to ourselvesMajumdar wants readers to leave the novel doing something harder than sympathizing with characters under pressure. She wants them to turn the book’s central question onto their own lives.
I’d love for them to think about how they make moral choices in their own life. How do they make decisions about right and wrong? What of their morals do they surrender, and what do they hold on to?
The novel refuses to treat hope as an uncomplicated good. Majumdar’s argument, developed across both characters’ parallel arcs, is that hope’s very force is what makes it dangerous: it can drive a person toward choices that contradict everything they believed about themselves.
Hope and love are far more complex than we might intuitively comprehend. I think the power of those feelings—the force contained in hope and love—is such that we might be driven to do things that we are not proud of; we might be driven to make choices that completely contradict our sense of ourselves as moral beings, as decent neighbors and friends and members of a community.
In conversation with Oprah, Majumdar made a case for what fiction specifically can restore that photographs and news reporting strip away. When a person appears in crisis coverage, the emergency becomes the only fact about them. Fiction, she argued, returns everything else.
their jokes, their humor, their love, their irritations, the things that annoy them, everything that makes them who they are. [paraphrased from audio]