47 pages • 1-hour read
A Guardian and a Thief
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence and death.
Survival Ethics in a Collapsing System
In A Guardian and a Thief, characters often struggle with making decisions in the face of sheer desperation. While Boomba, Ma, and other ordinary people all face the same problems, they turn against one another instead of uniting to ensure as many people as possible survive, instead focusing only on their own survival. Through their experiences, the novel examines survival ethics in a collapsing system, revealing how desperation can pit people against one another in an endless cycle that only worsens conditions for the community at large.
The novel suggests the people in Kolkata have lost their sense of community and morality, with Boomba noting how, “the worth of honesty, presented as noble before schoolchildren, was itself a lie” (31, emphasis added). Boomba believes that in his position, in which he can barely manage to keep a roof over his head, honesty would mean accepting his impoverished state and dying of starvation. When Boomba steals, his motivation is not to hurt other people but to protect himself. His witnessing of Ma stealing from the shelter reinforces his sense that, instead of working together to consolidate resources and help one another—as a shelter should do—people should see one another as rivals and compete for resources accordingly. Boomba and Ma’s endless frustrations and increasingly desperate behavior reveal that this scramble for resources only worsens the situation for both of them.
The problem of a lack of solidarity is also reflected on a global level in the novel. During Ma’s efforts to escape Kolkata, she learns that the flights to America are canceled because Americans are afraid of their own systems collapsing under the weight of climate immigration. Instead of responding with empathy and understanding, Americans treat the would-be immigrants with hostility and suspicion as if they are a threat, even though “nobody who had even dreamed of violent behavior was issued a visa” (185). Much as Ma and Dadu hurt others to protect themselves, Americans deny entry to immigrants to protect themselves instead of recognizing them as fellow sufferers of a global crisis.
Thus, instead of working with other countries to address the global crisis ultimately threatening all countries, America’s response betrays the same individualistic, short-term survival strategy demonstrated by Boomba and Ma in their own decisions and behavior. The novel thus suggests that abandoning all sense of community and ethics does not stave off collapse, on either an individual or national level—instead, it merely hastens the destruction and intensifies the suffering of virtually all.
The Challenges of Parenthood and Protectiveness
Early in the novel, a cockroach climbs Mishti’s leg and “Ma suppressed her own lifelong fear and flicked the insect off with her bare hand” (10), reflecting her instinctive reaction of setting aside personal qualms to help her daughter. As the novel progresses, however, Ma’s behavior becomes increasingly desperate and violent, reflecting the challenges of parenthood and protectiveness and how such instincts can sometimes go too far.
Ma tries to navigate her situation by telling herself that only protecting Mishti matters, which leads her to harden her heart towards others. When Ma realizes other children might have lice, which could infect Mishti, she thinks of herself as a “mother with no generosity, mother to nobody but her own child, her love showing how mother was the opposite of motherly” (65, emphasis added). Ma recognizes that her protective instincts are leading her to dismiss, and sometimes actively harm, other people and even other children: She has stolen from other families to feed her own, and she would do so again for Mishti’s sake. While Ma tells herself she is only protecting her daughter, she is failing to see other children as just as worthy.
Towards the novel’s close, Ma’s unwillingness to moderate between her protective instincts and her duties to others results in her own violent death. When she confronts Boomba’s father, she prepares to stab him with gardening shears, insisting that Boomba’s father is “no man at all but a collection of obstacles, a bundle of threats, a compilation of miseries” (201, emphasis added). Set between her own family and another, Ma literally stops seeing other people as human beings, instead transforming them in her mind into “obstacles,” “threats,” and “miseries” that might disrupt her efforts to protect her child. What Ma does not consider is that Boomba’s family have now adopted the same view, with Boomba’s father killing her in self-defense, both to secure his own safety and maintain the house for his family.
The novel presents a possible alternative to Ma’s aggressive, exclusive protectiveness in the shape of Boomba’s gradual love and care for Mishti. While Boomba begins the novel caring only for his own family, as Ma does, he softens towards Mishti, ultimately choosing to abandon a bag of much-needed rice to save Mishti’s life when the boat sinks. His willingness to risk himself to save someone else’s child, and willingness to adopt Mishti into his family at the end, lends a brief note of hope and altruism to the novel, with Boomba’s actions suggesting that instincts of protectiveness and care can—and should—be extended to those outside of one’s own family.
The Urgency of the Climate Crisis
A Guardian and a Thief is set in the “near-future,” presenting a possible worsening of the current climate crisis to showcase the breakdown of systems when proper action is not taken. Kolkata in the novel is not just going through a drought, a famine, or a plague, but instead enduring all three. While the ordinary characters suffer deprivation and desperation while fighting for the necessities of life, the billionaire hoards all of the resources for herself, revealing both the urgency of the climate crisis and the inequality that makes such a crisis first possible, and then unmanageable.
In Mrs. Sen’s story, the narrator describes “the city’s burning, and the city’s submergence. Crop fields in the region turned black in the sun, or were flooded with salt water, invaded by unlikely pest, and went to ruin” (56). This apocalyptic description serves to highlight the severity of the crisis, combining all the prior crises into a single, devastating, and long-lasting disaster. Majumdar emphasizes the wide-scale nature of the crisis, even in side stories like Mrs. Sen’s, to communicate how climate change can affect everyone when left unaddressed. When a city is burning, flooding, or infested with pests, no single person can surmount the crisis. Instead, entire systems need to change, governments and communities need to counter the advancing disasters, and individual people need to work together to find solutions.
The figure of the billionaire represents the gross wealth inequality and lack of accountability that plunges Kolkata into crisis and prevents the crisis from being adequately addressed. The billionaire’s lifestyle is depicted as overwhelmingly opulent and wasteful: While the ordinary residents of Kolkata starve and struggle, the billionaire throws lavish events with plenty of food, using up resources with abandon even when such an excessive lifestyle harms both the planet and the billionaire’s own community. The grounds of the hexagon also reflect this hoarding of resources, with the billionaire preserving some measure of Kolkata’s ecosystem on her island while the city at large faces ecological ruin. The billionaire’s token gestures—such as founding the shelter—do nothing to address the systematic injustice that allows her to live a wasteful life while others starve and the city burns. Her detachment and lack of accountability speak to how such inequality and wasteful consumerism, when left unchecked, has the power to destroy entire societies.
Ultimately, A Guardian and a Thief advocates for taking the threat of climate change seriously, while also exposing the systematic injustices that make such a crisis possible in the first place. The author suggests that the climate crisis must be faced directly if the world is to avoid the fate of Kolkata in the novel.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence