On Sept. 23, days before Durga Puja, the biggest annual carnival for Bengalis, the city of Kolkata experienced a shocking cloudburst. In just a few hours, parts of West Bengal’s capital saw nearly a foot of rainfall, which led to flash floods and the death of at least 12 people. Cars and buses floated on arterial roads as residents drained buckets of water from their houses. Homeless people scrambled to find shelter, and the power supply was disrupted for hours. A bizarre video of a snake swimming in a flooded backyard with a fish in its mouth went viral on social media.
All these scenes could have come from Megha Majumdar’s prescient new novel, A Guardian and a Thief, set in a near-future apocalyptic Kolkata that is reeling from an acute food shortage caused by severe weather fluctuations. In this “ruined year,” Majumdar writes at the beginning of the book, “the heat [was] a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one’s head.” The searing days are interspersed with spells of intense rain, when sheets of water blur human vision and destroy crops, harvest, and lives with abandon: “By this time, stormwater was turning lanes into canals,” as “Kolkata was at last Venice.”
On Sept. 23, days before Durga Puja, the biggest annual carnival for Bengalis, the city of Kolkata experienced a shocking cloudburst. In just a few hours, parts of West Bengal’s capital saw nearly a foot of rainfall, which led to flash floods and the death of at least 12 people. Cars and buses floated on arterial roads as residents drained buckets of water from their houses. Homeless people scrambled to find shelter, and the power supply was disrupted for hours. A bizarre video of a snake swimming in a flooded backyard with a fish in its mouth went viral on social media.
The book cover for A Guardian and a Thief
A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar, Knopf, 224 pp., $29, October 2025
All these scenes could have come from Megha Majumdar’s prescient new novel, A Guardian and a Thief, set in a near-future apocalyptic Kolkata that is reeling from an acute food shortage caused by severe weather fluctuations. In this “ruined year,” Majumdar writes at the beginning of the book, “the heat [was] a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one’s head.” The searing days are interspersed with spells of intense rain, when sheets of water blur human vision and destroy crops, harvest, and lives with abandon: “By this time, stormwater was turning lanes into canals,” as “Kolkata was at last Venice.”
Yet not everyone is thrown adrift by the volatile climate; even doomsday affects the rich and poor differently. This reality hits home early in the novel, with a massive outburst from a man who makes a living by pressing clothes for the few customers still concerned about appearances amid climate catastrophe. “You people think a shortage is only a shortage if it reduces your Sunday lunch?” he explodes at Ma, Mishti, and Dadu—the mother, daughter, and grandfather trio at the center of the story. “You people think a flood is only a flood if it comes into your house?”
By throwing his rage-filled questions at this relatively privileged family, the ironing man acts like the chorus in a classic Greek drama: He becomes the voice of the community, a stand-in for the collective grief over the loss of basic resources to capitalist greed and destruction. The climate crisis, Majumdar reminds the reader, isn’t a great leveler but rather a great divider—a force that ensures only the survival of the wealthiest. Yet in A Guardian and a Thief, she shows that the poor, too, can come out alive, clinging to the vestiges of their dignity with cunning and enterprise, instead of becoming an inert statistic by succumbing to the corrupt might of the state.
A hand reaches out of an open window tossing rice to a large crowd below that’s holding up clothes to catch it.
Hindu devotees collect rice as offerings during the Annakut festival in Kolkata on Nov. 12, 2015. Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP via Getty Images
Like Majumdar’s remarkable debut A Burning, A Guardian and a Thief has also been named a finalist for the National Book Award. But the similarities do not end there. Like its predecessor, this one is also a short novel, tightly plotted, that unfolds over the course of a week. And, once again, it is set in Kolkata, the city that Majumdar grew up in, though she has lived in the United States for nearly two decades.
As the story begins, Ma, Dadu, and two-year-old Mishti are about to set off for the U.S. Consulate to collect their passports with “climate visas”—their ticket to joining Baba, Mishti’s father, in Michigan, where he is working as a climate scientist, one of the few lucky escapees from the hell that his hometown has become. As their resources keep dwindling, Ma and Dadu try their best to stretch their rations to last for their final few days in the city, while the family holds on to the hope for a better life in Michigan.
In the meantime, hunger drives their neighbors to eat “synthetic fish” and seaweed, since fresh vegetables are scarce. Violence breaks out over the ownership of a single cauliflower, Mishti’s favorite food, and a greengrocer is ambushed by a raging mob yelling for fistfuls of rice and lentils. No one wants to utter the dreaded F-word, but the city’s inhabitants are well aware of its history of famines. In 1770, a crop failure, followed by a smallpox epidemic, decimated the population. The Bengal famine of 1943, caused by pernicious British strategy during World War II, killed millions.
Just a week away from their much-awaited family reunion, a series of mishaps turn Ma, Dadu, and Mishti’s lives upside down. A homeless young man named Boomba sneaks into their upper-middle class house in the dead of night and steals Ma’s purse, which contains the passports. He takes the cash but doesn’t know the significance of the booklets, so he tosses them into a garbage dump.
Boomba is desperate to earn some money so that he can bring his destitute parents and baby brother to Kolkata. Their miserable existence in West Bengal’s deltaic fringes, presumably in the Sundarbans, remains perennially vulnerable to diseases, especially to the deadly mosquito-borne cerebral malaria, as well as tiger attacks (of which Boomba’s father is a victim) and flash floods that wash away their community’s meager homes and provisions. His family’s current refuge—or rather, what passes for it—is a sheet of tarp placed on stilts, open to the elements and other dangers on all sides.
As a boy, all Boomba ever wanted was to be “an explorer, like Ibn Battuta and Vasco da Gama,” so that “he could climb aboard a boat and sail far, very far, down the Nile River and down the coast of Somalia, to look for a new land in which to make a home for his family.” Instead, as a young adult, he ended up in Kolkata a couple of years before the events of the novel, penniless and friendless, doing odd jobs, and trailed by misfortunes. The last straw came when a tree, its trunk weakened by rain and flooding, collapsed on his rented room, cleaving it in two and throwing him out on the streets.
Trying to keep body and soul together in the furnace that is the outdoors, where no one is surprised anymore by birds dropping dead from the scorching sky, Boomba ended up at a children’s shelter managed by Ma. At 20, he was way past the qualifying age, but she took pity on him in one of her rare “magnanimous moments, when she had believed … that the shelter’s children were all her children.”
But, as the food shortage worsened in the weeks and months to come, so did Ma’s maternal instincts. Frantic about keeping her own daughter nourished and protected, she began to steal food and small sums of money from the donations made by the city’s last billionaire—an act to which Boomba became privy, and he used that knowledge to blackmail Ma. Even after Ma discovers his theft, she cannot take him to the police. For Boomba would then expose her pilfering to the authorities, and the slightest whiff of criminal activity might jeopardize her prospect of leaving the country.
If Majumdar is censorious about Ma’s indiscretions, she is sensitive to what is, in the end, a universal instinct: the desire to protect one’s own at the exclusion of all else. Ultimately, that is what passes for love, and Boomba, too, is susceptible to it, ready to commit terrible crimes for the sake of his family’s future. Ma pays a steep price for doing her duty by her child, as does Dadu, in his adamant pursuit of sustenance for his daughter and granddaughter.
A woman wearing glasses and a patterned tunic stands against a brick wall.
Megha Majumdar stands outside of her home in Brooklyn, New York, on April 29, 2020. Daniel Dorsa/The New York Times via Redux
In an interview about her first novel, Majumdar said, “I wanted to write about things I know, about the intelligence and determination of ordinary people to find ways to get around systems that do not serve them.” She pursues the same principle in her second book, with more complexity and a stronger political critique.
Nowhere is her focus more apparent than in the subplot she builds around the city’s last billionaire, who lives on a floating hexagon-like island of luxury in the middle of the Hooghly River. As millions die of hunger, this unnamed tycoon decides to throw a lavish feast for the poor to celebrate her child’s wedding. In the mad rush to get to the banquet, thousands nearly kill each other to get onto the ferries that will allow them a chance to have a rare square meal.
Majumdar’s novel makes chillingly real the law of the world, where big fish eat small fish—where Boomba, Ma and her family, the billionaire, and everyone in between belong to specific tiers of the social pyramid, all of them caught in a never-ending struggle to climb higher. When Ma, Dadu, and Mishti visit the U.S. Consulate, for instance, miserable families seeking visas look at them with envy pouring out of their eyes as they walk away with their precious passports—their ticket to a future that remains out of most people’s reach.
Majumdar is careful not to offer immigration as the best solution to problems that are burning up the world. Even for the fortunate few like Baba, who have safely made it to the other side, “the pride of having immigrated was also, in truth, the wound.” It is a wound of not feeling like they belong in their adopted country, one that is caused by repeated rejection from a society that never fully accepts them for who they are. It is also a wound of their own making; one they have inflicted upon themselves by abandoning their beloved home city.
As Majumdar writes, referring to Dadu as he grapples with the ache of his impending departure from Kolkata for Michigan: “This was the city he believed in, the city in which knowing somebody once was knowing them forever.” It’s a sentiment that immigrants all over the world will recognize and grieve for.
