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In the opening lines of her latest novel A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar drops us directly in the path of the incipient climate catastrophe: “Kolkata in this ruined year, the heat a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one’s head.” It’s a near-future where rising temperatures haven’t quite pushed society past its tipping point, but the oncoming disaster is already felt in the form of food scarcity, wet bulb heatwaves, and a frantic scramble for dwindling resources or “climate visas” to someplace else where the impact has been more tolerable.
Majumdar explores the moral compromises this world of calamity may force upon us by telling the story of a family on the cusp of emigrating to the United States. At the last minute, their visas disappear. As they attempt to rectify the matter, their increasingly dire circumstances push to behave in ways that cross their typical ethical codes and boundaries.
With her 2020 debut A Burning, Majumdar earned fast recognition for her powerful prose and insightful social critiques. Now her follow-up A Guardian and a Thief was a National Book Award finalist and she is being hailed as one of the most essential literary voices to emerge from her climate-stalked generation. I spoke with Majumdar about the inspiration for her novel and the terrible moral dilemmas we’ll be forced to confront as temperatures rise and food becomes scarce.
Where did the idea for A Guardian and a Thief come from?
My hometown, Kolkata, India, is one of the cities in the world most profoundly affected by climate change. It has grown hotter and it is predicted to endure more storms in the coming decades—more storms and more severe storms. I was thinking about what the lived experience of that kind of climate change will be. I was thinking about needing shade, needing garments that help you stay cool. I was thinking about carrying not just water when you go out but also electrolyte pills, and I was thinking about how it would affect agriculture, how it would change food.
Then, thinking through all of that, I started thinking about what love and hope look like in this situation of crisis. And what happens when, in a time of crisis, love and hope gain manifestations that are really different from what we assume they are? We think that these are noble emotions, that there’s something straightforward about them, but what if your love for your family forces you to do things which destroy your sense of yourself as an ethical person? Are you still proud of that kind of love? How do you live with yourself as somebody whose love has forced them into that place? So I think just the moral murkiness that kind of scarcity and devastation can reveal is very interesting to me.
What do you think was the hardest part about forecasting the future?
I think finding the place where the future contains plenty of difference—the book refers to things like robot police patrol dogs and small elements like that—but keeping it really close to our present world, such that the human relationships, the emotions, the concerns like migration and food feel very present to us. That movement between an imagined future and a very real present from which that future could feasibly grow—that movement felt delicate.
The book has been nominated for a National Book Award. Why do you think it struck such a chord with people?
I hope that what is speaking to readers is the core of the book, which is so much about being a parent during a crisis. And I hope that it’s a book that’s encouraging people to think about how they would behave in a morally difficult situation. I think we all live in a world where we are subject to forces greater than ourselves. We live within networks of power. We live underneath people who possess greater resources and wealth and make decisions that affect us. That truth of understanding that we make moral decisions all the time, and yet we are not making those decisions in a free place—we are making those decisions while being subject to all of these other forces. How do you live? How do you carry out the roles of being a mother, a grandfather, a sibling? How does your understanding of these roles change?
I started thinking about what love and hope look like in this situation of crisis.
A sub-theme to climate change you explore is how it affects people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, visa situations, and so on. What do you want people to know about that aspect of climate change?
One thing that I think a lot about is class, and how people who have different levels of wealth and privilege and resources will be able to deal with the effects of climate change differently. So who deserves to be safe? Who deserves to have a steady supply of food? Who deserves to be in a cool and dry house, rather than baking in the heat outside while working? Who deserves escape when a situation becomes unsustainable?
And I think that we’re also moving toward a reality where the kind of migration that I discuss in the book will become more and more prevalent. In college when the Darfur conflict was very much in the news, I remember being in a class and the professor saying that so much of this conflict is discussed in terms of ethnicity and stuff like that, but you have to look at it as a resource war. So many of these conflicts are driven by scarcity of water, and that was maybe the first time that somebody helped me see how political framing of conflict can neglect how many of these conflicts are rooted in resource scarcity and connected to climate change—changing river patterns, changing rainfall patterns, changing availability of crops typical for a region, changing patterns of pests that feed on those crops. All of these things are connected to conflict and migration. These realities have been present for a long time, and they will probably only get more pressing.
Billionaires play a key role in the book’s narrative. Why do you think it’s important for people to understand or to think about the role billionaires have to play in climate change and society?
They are the people who make decisions that affect the rest of us. We are affected by actions that are taken and actions that are not taken, by what knowledge is distributed, by what we get to think about and examine, how the media relay information to us about current research, about the paths that we are on. All of us who are ordinary people are affected by decisions made by very few people, and we have to figure out what moral agency we have while accepting how we are subject to greater powers, and how we are subject to the choices that other people make. How do we live as independent, free-thinking people who still make our own choices within that?
At one point in the book a character hangs a poster of Einstein on his wall. Why Einstein?
I needed to find an aspirational figure that is recognizable, even to a character like Boomba. I think it represents his hope for his brother, a future of education, a future of educational accomplishment, which will probably resonate especially with Indian readers like me, who are very aware of the emphasis on education and schooling. One of the reasons that this character is so desperate to move his young brother out of the village and into the city is so that he can be safe and go to school.
What do you think people misunderstand about the climate refugee crisis?
In fiction, I think what we can do is allow a reader to enter this kind of question in a very human way—where you enter it not by thinking about groups of people or numbers, but by thinking about the life of one person, or one family. A reader of fiction comes to this question by feeling close to the characters, so my work was to allow a reader to come close to these characters—to make sure that, while I’m writing about this situation of climate crisis, what I am foregrounding is the human experience of it. When a child asks for cauliflower, or a grandfather steals an orange from a kid to give it to his own grandchild—that kind of moment lets a reader be emotionally present within the truth of that reality. I think that’s what fiction can do.
Of the many issues your book deals with—floods, heat, famine, pollution and so on—which do you worry about the most?
In my reading, one that I felt was less discussed was the future of food. That’s what I really wanted to think about in this book. So much of the food that we take for granted—the fruits and vegetables, the proteins—they might become less nutritious because of changing soil quality. And they might become less available because of changing weather, changing regions of where insects live, and of course, changing rain and drought patterns.
I think a lot about the future of food, also because food has such an emotional charge. Think about having a meal with your family, or celebrating something—we often have a special meal. Having a Sunday lunch or dinner is a special thing in many families. So what happens when the food you sit down to is not your familiar roast or whatever it is you like to eat, but instead it’s made from cricket flour, or some form of algae? How does that change the emotional texture of family life, collective life—the comfort that we get from food?
Over the course of writing this book, how did it change how you think about climate change and society? And how do you hope it affects your readers?
I think the book helped me face some really terrifying but also very intriguing questions about how we will behave in a disaster. And I think…you know—the disasters are coming. How will we balance the love and care that we have for our loved ones against the love and care that we have for our neighbors and our fellow citizens? And how will that change our understanding of ourselves as people who live in a society—who are grateful to have neighbors, grateful to run into people when you take a walk on the street, and grateful to see your friends? How will it alter the texture of those relationships when everything is scarce? Will we really show our true selves then? Or are we our true selves now, in this time of relative comfort and abundance for most of us?
And what do I hope a reader thinks about? Well, first of all, I hope that they find themselves invited into the story. That’s part of what I tried really hard to do—to write a book that makes you think and feel, but also hopefully entertains you. I care a lot about entertaining the reader, even though that might sound a little strange. I think a lot about how to do that as a writer.
And then I hope that readers think about who they might be in such a situation of moral crisis. How would they live with the choices that the characters face in the book? What decisions would they make? What do love and hope come to mean for them in a time of scarcity? 
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Lead image: New Africa / Shutterstock
