A Guardian And A Thief by Megha Majumdar

The title characters of Megha Majumdar’s second novel are a young man referred to only by a nickname, Boomba, and a woman known as Ma. Each regards themselves as a guardian, and the other as a thief. The reader is left to decide which is which or are they both. The book takes place in the near future, where climate change is wrecking real havoc. The course of events happen over what is meant to be the last week of Ma living in Kolkata. She, her father and her two-year-old daughter are about to join Ma’s husband in the United States, as the recipients of prized “climate visas”. Floods and extreme heat have turned Kolkata into a city of persistent food shortages. Black marketeers hoard eggs, fruit and vegetables, while fish, previously the cornerstone of Bengali cooking, has vanished altogether. The terrifying word famine is disinterred. This is one of the many ways in which climate change has sent Kolkata forward into the past. Something it is all too easy to picture happening here--the government wants the rich to get richer, there to be no rules for them, and to send women and people of color back a century. If not further. Boomba robs Ma, and a cascade of things follow. This is a short book that leaves you with a lot to think about.