A Guardian and a Thief

I read this book recently and my mind is still kind of spinning from it. The setting alone is enough to give you nightmares. It is set in Kolkata but definitely not the one we know today. The whole city is completely underwater from climate change and there is a massive famine going on. People are literally starving in the streets and fighting over scraps. You can almost feel the sticky humidity and the desperation bleeding off the pages while you read it.

Right in the middle of all this mess is Ma. She runs a local shelter and looks like this perfect pillar of the community. She finally gets these super rare climate visas to take her dad and her two year old daughter out of the country. They are supposed to go to Michigan to join her husband. They are all packed and ready to escape and then she wakes up and realizes her bag is missing. All the passports and those precious visas are just gone.

Then we meet Boomba. He is twenty years old and completely homeless. He used to hang around the shelter Ma runs. He actually broke into her house looking for food because his own family is starving to death. He grabbed the bag on his way out without even knowing what was inside. From that point on the book turns into a wild race against the clock. Ma has to track this kid down and get her papers back before her flight takes off and leaves them stranded forever.

The crazy thing is how much you end up feeling bad for both of them. You want to hate Boomba for stealing the tickets to a better life but he is literally just trying to feed his family. He sells the passports to blackmail Ma just so he can buy a little bit of rice. And Ma seems so good but you find out she has been stealing food from her own shelter for years to keep her family fed. It is all about the terrible things normal people will do when they are pushed into a corner.

I spent the whole book feeling incredibly stressed out. It reads fast like a movie and you just keep turning the pages wanting to know who is going to win this awful tug of war. Majumdar does an amazing job making you question your own morals. I kept asking myself what I would do if my own family was starving and honestly the answers made me uncomfortable. It is a fantastic read but do not expect to feel happy or relaxed when you finish it.