A Guardian and a Thief

A Guardian and a Thief is written with two primary styles of chapters: days and phone conversations. The days allow the reader to keep track of the events in a linear progression, but they also serve to emphasize the time limit placed on Ma’s family by the flight to America. Since Ma needs to get everything ready for Day 7, the progression from Day 1 to Day 2 carries the added weight of being one less day to prepare. These chapters are then punctuated by the shorter Phone chapters, which show Ma talking to her husband, Baba, long-distance. In the first Phone chapter, everything is alright, and Ma assures Baba that the family will come to America without incident. These chapters highlight the distance between Ma and Baba, revealing that Baba is waiting for his family, but he does not have direct access to the events of the novel. As the Phone chapters progress, they act as a separate reality from the events in Kolkata, since the narrative in these chapters is entirely dictated by what Ma chooses to share with her husband.

The novel is set in Kolkata, but the characters give radically different views of the city. Dadu notes that Kolkata “will survive because it is full of such street corner philosophers. They understand that laughing is the most truthful way of approaching life” (10), but Ma disagrees, recalling the sexual violence and harassment in the city, with “men on buses who reached for schoolgirls; chests. Once, she had been such a schoolgirl” (11). These opposing views are rooted in the gendered difference in their lived experiences, but they also reflect the critical distinction between these two characters. Dadu is an optimist and a philosopher in his own way, and he chooses to see the best of the city he loves. Ma, on the other hand, is a realist, seeing the flaws in the city, even though she also feels a strong connection to it. These differences carry over into how Ma and Dadu approach problems, such as Ma cleaning up Mishti’s messes while Dadu tells her stories. In essence, both of their views of Kolkata are accurate, but each has had different experiences that shape their relationship to the city.

In order to set up the “near-future” element of the text, Majumdar includes minor details, like synthetic food and references to rapidly increasing climate issues, which help introduce the theme of The Urgency of Climate Change. Dadu predicts that the consulate itself will close in less than four months due to the climate crisis, and the narrator adds: “America would retrieve its valued citizens from the foreign positions, hardship pay no longer sufficient compensation for the crisis in which they found themselves” (46-7, emphasis added), implying that foreign nations need to pay additional salary to get anyone to work in crisis areas. At the same time, the term “valued citizens” implies that the citizens of India, or Kolkata specifically, are not “valued” the way foreign Westerners are, which is likewise emphasized by the nature of a “climate visa.” A climate visa, in this context, is written permission for someone in a crisis area to move to a safer area in another country. By limiting these visas with rules and conditions, America is not only establishing a value for their own citizens, but placing an arbitrary value on human life in these climate-ravaged areas.

In addition to the consulate’s reluctance to aid Ma’s family, which she calls the “kingdom” controlling its people, official channels of all kinds are devalued in the text, introducing the problem of Survival Ethics in a Collapsing System. When Ma and Dadu go to the police, they explicitly laugh at the family, accusing them of being crooks. The officers note that they “are seeing violent crimes now,” as well as fraud, such as “that other chap who had flooded his own house for the insurance” (43). While these details emphasize the desperation of the situation in Kolkata, they also remind the reader that the official, normal means of resolving conflicts is no longer available to regular people. The police cannot help Ma and Dadu find their passports, nor can the consulate issue new passports and visas, leaving Ma and Dadu, despite having fulfilled their end of the bargain, from executing their escape plan. By introducing this problem early in the text, Majumdar is hinting to the reader that individuals in Kolkata feel abandoned by traditional support systems.