Megha Majumdar grew up in Kolkata and was reading about how profoundly affected Kolkata is, and will be, by climate change after the IPCC report which came out a few years ago. In reading about that, she started thinking about the lived texture of climate change, remembering days as a kid when the summer would see some days which were 40 degrees. She wondered what it would look like in the future, when there are more days like that, and of severe storms and flooding.
Thinking about what Kolkata will look like several decades into the future, she began to reflect on hope, questions of morality, and what happens when individual hope comes up against the hope of the collective. The experience of becoming a mother really helped her find the emotional core of her second novel, and helped her think about what it will be like to be a parent in a climate crisis.
This led to the growth of A Guardian and a Thief, which took 6 years to write. The plot follows two families, each struggling to care for their own, but in ways that come into conflict. We spoke to her about her writing process, themes that the book follows, and the importance of fiction. More below.
You explore moral clashes, with guardianship and theft in conflict. How do you see this in the world today, and why is it important to fictionalise?
I think we live within networks of power and systems by which the world runs, that do not necessarily serve ordinary people, that do not serve most of us. I think we are always making, on some scale, ethical choices about what we will consume, what we will buy, what we will choose to do every day, who we will support.
The novel helps me think through those questions by putting two families in a situation where they are thinking about these questions but in an extreme way. The pressure on them is much greater than what most of us experience day to day.
What is your writing process like, and how did you handle the two families and conflicting voices in this book?
I think of fiction as a way to ask questions that really matter to me. I start with a question, and the question for this book was something like: how do you live with yourself if your love for your child or your family comes up against your sense of yourself as a moral person, as an ethical person in the world? What if love and ethics come into conflict? How do you make your way in such a situation?
For me, writing is so much about failing. The hard part about writing is just coming back to the page day after day and confronting that feeling of failure, confronting that feeling of not doing this as well as I want to, not being able to find the right images or the right movement of plot. This book took me six years to write. A lot of the difficulty was facing that failure and not being afraid of it, understanding that failure is how you get to a draft that you are ultimately happy with.
It is a very slow process of keeping that central question in mind and then trying to write a plot that engages a reader and invites them in. While the central question is really important to me, part of what I find really fun about writing is thinking about entertainment. What entertains a person, what keeps a person turning the pages, what makes a person feel like they need to know what happens next?
When I was a kid I read a lot of Famous Five and Secret Seven, and you know that feeling where you just have so much fun with the book? Since those were my formative experiences of reading, maybe that is what I go back to, thinking about how I can make my book something that makes a reader think but also makes a reader feel like they are having fun.
“Leaving behind your hometown is a wound. My parents still live in Kolkata, my extended family is there. I think I left behind a self that I could have been there. So the understanding of migration as composed of both pride and meaning, and also injury and sorrow, felt important for this book. ”
You grew up in Kolkata and now live in New York. Since the book also deals with movement and leaving, what place did your lived realities have in the narrative?
I moved from Kolkata to the U.S. to go to college when I was 19. One thing I realised recently is that I am very happy with my life here. I feel very grateful that I get to live here and have a life centred around books and writing. But there is also a wound. Leaving behind your hometown is a wound. My parents still live in Kolkata, my extended family is there. I think I left behind a self that I could have been there. So the understanding of migration as composed of both pride and meaning, and also injury and sorrow, felt important for this book.
How was writing this novel different from your debut? What did you carry forward from your first book and how was this experience different or similar?
My first book A Burning felt more straightforward. I felt more certain of what the story was, though it still took me a lot of time to write it. With the second book I knew the moral question at the heart of it. I knew I wanted to set this in future Kolkata, in the climate crisis and food scarcity. But it took me a long time to find the actual plot. I was writing a completely different plot about a child searching for a rumoured market. I wrote pages about a robbery at a hotel, about a vertical farm, about a friend character. I cut all of those pages. It also took me a long time to figure out that I needed to write the thief character fully, and that the thief could not just be a secondary character. So there were many more twists and turns in the writing of this book.
What do you hope readers take away from the book? And what are you working on next?
I hope a reader feels invited into the book and into this world fully, and that it is worthy of their time. Reading a book takes a lot of time, so if I am making that claim on someone’s time it really needs to be worth it. I hope it leaves readers thinking about questions like: what would you do when your love for your family or children comes up against your sense of what is right? How would you deal with moral dilemmas in a situation of food scarcity? What would you do when your hope and love become something vicious and mean? Are you still proud of that form of hope and love? As for what I am working on next, another novel, which is very different. That is all I will say.
Words Neeraja Srinivasan
Date 28-10-2025