Author Megha Majumdar Explores Parenting and Survival in a Climate-Ravaged Kolkata in A Guardian and a Thief
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Asia Tabb
AIRED; September 11, 2025
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What does it mean to protect your family when the world itself is falling apart? That question is at the heart of Megha Majumdar’s new novel, A Guardian and a Thief.
“A Guardian and a Thief is a novel about being a parent in climate crisis,” Majumdar said. “It’s a novel set in my hometown of Kolkata, India where in the near future, there’s a shortage of food, there are more severe storms, and in this crisis, two families who are trying to protect their own children come into conflict with each other.”
For Majumdar, the choice of setting was deeply personal. “It’s my hometown. It’s where I was born and I lived there until I was 19 years old,” she explained. “Kolkata is a really special place to me. It’s a place where the arts are highly valued. It’s a place where there’s a lot of humor in everyday life. There’s lots of beauty in street side conversations, which I wanted to bring into the book as well.”
The novel unfolds over the course of just one week—a structure Majumdar says took many drafts to perfect. “I knew that I wanted to write a story where the characters would be under great pressure and they would be at the edge of something,” she said. “One of the main characters is on the verge of moving with her toddler and her elderly father away from India to Michigan. I wanted to follow them over a very short period of time and show how they were surviving this last week before escape—until something goes very wrong.”
That central character, Ma, was not always the novel’s focus. Originally, Majumdar planned to write about a young child navigating a collapsing world. But her own life shifted the story’s direction. “I had my son in 2021, and becoming a mother changed how I looked at this character and the story,” she said. “I became much more interested in the story of the mother of this child that I was trying to write at the time. And I thought, who is the mother?”
Opposite Ma is Boomba, the thief referenced in the title—a young man from a village struggling to survive in the city. “He is trying to protect his own younger brother and his parents,” Majumdar said. “I never wanted to write a thief who would just be a plain and simple villain. Because that’s neither true nor interesting, right? People contain contradictions. People might do vicious and fierce things in order to protect their own children. I was very interested in this question of what happens when your love for your own family comes up against your moral borders, your ethical—what do you do then?”
With A Guardian and a Thief, Majumdar delivers a story that is both urgent and intimate, blending the realities of climate change with timeless questions about love, loyalty, and sacrifice.