Novelist Megha Majumdar’s hometown of Kolkata is one of the cities most affected by climate change. That kind of classification of a place is commonly heard in news stories now, usually accompanied by images of the destruction wrought thus far or inflicted freshly by some wild storm or flood or fire.
But the surplus of bad news offers us little else. Bereft of context or the nuances of human experiences, we’re left with not much more than data. Majumdar sees fiction as a space in which those visions of people and places can be fleshed out.
The Associated Press
She continues to build a vision of Kolkata in her second novel A Guardian and a Thief, named a finalist for the National Book Award shortly before its release in mid-October; her debut, A Burning, was set in the same city and made the award’s long list after its release in 2020.
Majumdar, 38, uses fiction to ask questions that “feel more pressing in a more fundamental way.”
“Questions like, what is the right way to live? What is a moral way to live? What does it mean to have an ethical self in a world where we do live under systems of power?” she says over the phone from New York, where she lives.
“Fiction feels like a good place for approaching these questions by pushing characters.”
Set in the near future, A Guardian and a Thief opens with Ma, her elderly father Dadu and her toddler daughter Mishti as the trio prepare to acquire the necessary travel documents and emigrate to the United States, where they’ll be reunited with Ma’s husband in Michigan.
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The heat, humidity and hunger that permeate the desperate picture of the city also push the characters toward seemingly unfathomable actions in the span of some-200 pages of the book. The theft of the aforementioned travel documents, just one week before the family’s scheduled flight, sets off a breathless and at times nearly fantastical chain of events in which ethical assumptions are constantly challenged.
For Majumdar, fiction is about trying to approach the truth.
“There is no simple answer for why people make the choices they do,” she says. “Anything that’s overly simple is probably simplistic to the point of being false.”
She searches for complexity: What happens when parents act out of love for their children, with a detrimental effect on their community? Is it okay to steal food from a stranger’s child, she wonders, in order to feed your own?
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“How do we navigate the really murky regions of moral life?” Majumdar says. “Those are questions I feel pretty obsessed with. What is the right way to live? What is a good act? What choices can we justify and live with and be proud of?”
Majumdar writes from the thoughts of Baba, Ma’s husband: “The pride of having immigrated was also, in truth, the wound.”
The sentiment resonates with Majumdar’s own experience of immigration. She moved to the U.S. from Kolkata in 2006 when she was 19 to attend Harvard University. In the ensuing years, life in America has offered art, music, readings, a feeling of freedom. But she also feels “somewhere between outsider and insider.” The question hangs in her mind: Is the Kolkata of the present the same city of her youth? She has left behind her mother tongue, Bengali, and many childhood friends.
“I think there is quite a depth of sorrow that probably many immigrants carry with them,” Majumdar says. “And that sorrow is as true as our joy at having made new lives here.”
In spite of carrying this sorrow, Majumdar does not despair about what’s to come.
“I hope that in this future, part of what becomes clear is that many of the elements of it are grim and frightening,” Majumdar says. “But it’s not dire. There are always the relationships with people which lift us up. There’s always humour and art and beauty.”