Desi Talk

www.desitalk.com – that’s all you need to know 18 BOOKS October 31, 2025 National Book Award Finalist ‘A Guardian And A Thief’ Will Make You Sweat A Guardian and a Thief, By Megha Majumdar. Knopf. 205 pp. $29 M egha Majumdar’s “A Guardian and a Thief” is such an anxious book that even when you finally put it down, you’ll hear it sitting there on the shelf, panting. A finalist for this year’s National Book Award in fiction, it’s a perfect short novel: 200 pages of tightly honed panic about life in a collapsing society. Once again, Majumdar is back in Kol- kata, India, the setting of her searing first novel, “A Burning,” which revolves around the firebombing of a passenger train. But this story opens, instead, with a burst of private optimism. In exactly one week, Ma will take her father, Dadu, and her 2-year- old daughter, Mishti, to America where her husband awaits. Just seven days until this deserving family can escape the deadly heat, corrupt government and gathering famine that have rendered the city impossible to endure. Ma has carefully arranged every one of the thousands of details necessary to carry off her family’s transcontinental leap toward salvation. She’s resigned from her job at a local shelter and found the perfect replacement. She’s packed their suitcases and said “goodbye to this house, and to this kitchen, and to this stove.” All that remains is going to the American consulate and collecting their passports, “these divine documents” with their new “climate visas” – one of several subtle nods to the feverish future in which this story takes place. “She knew plenty about America,” Majumdar writes with her usual deadpan irony. “It was a country of breathable air and potable water, and, despite a history of attempts to cultivate a poorly educated electorate, functioning schools and tena- cious thinkers. It was a country of encom- passing hope, sustained by the people despite the peddlers of fear and pursuers of gain who wore the ill-fitting costumes of political representation. It was a coun- try of opportunity for her child.” To secure that precious opportunity, Ma must only survive the next seven days. “Extrication from one’s hometown was for the lucky,” she knows. “Her own luck dazzled her.” But then on Day 2 – admit it, you knew trouble was coming – a young man named Boomba slips through an open window while Ma and her family are sleeping. Starving in a city gripped by famine, the thief grabs as much food as he can, fills Ma’s purse with raisins and cashews and flees into the night. With the passports. Now the fuse is lit. These tense chap- ters – labeled “Day 3,” “Day 4” and so on – burn with increasing ferocity. This is only nominally a story about thwarted travel plans. Majumdar’s real subject, as always, is moral culpability. Like Chang-rae Lee’s dystopian novel “On Such a Full Sea” (2014), “A Guard- ian and a Thief” captures the anxiety of shrinking resources, the sense of precarity that makes the upper classes obsessed with securing their advantages in a world slipping away. (See billionaire Peter Thiel’s recent lament about how difficult it’s become “to hide one’s money.”) Yet at the same time, the book’s simple struc- ture – its relentless movement through Ma’s seven days and the accumulation of disasters – feels reminiscent of a fairy tale, which helps account for the deep, visceral terror the story generates. As the clock ticks down, Ma rushes to the police, to the consulate, to anyone who might be able to find, replace or even counterfeit new passports and visas, but she’s tearing through a labyrinth of unsympathetic bureaucracy – the soft tyranny of a society in decay. In a world running out of water, food, even breath- able air, civil service has devolved into un- bridled resentment. “Tit for tat,” a young woman tells Ma. “That’s the only justice we can have these days, don’t you think?” But Majumdar will give our sympa- thies no stable resting place. She draws us deep into Boomba’s life, his thwarted ambitions, and the gross inequity that is a kind of quiet violence we’re conditioned to imagine is more tragic than criminal. Naturally, the thief has his own family to worry about: His parents and his little brother are starving under a tarp on the outskirts of town. Boomba knew to break into Ma’s house because he saw her steal- ing food from the shelter where she used to work. As Ma rushes to regain her passports and Boomba struggles to exploit his ad- vantage over her, the distinction between guardian and thief dissolves in Majum- dar’s acidic insight. All these characters are experts at preserving their innocence. Ma realizes that “she had believed herself different, and differently fated.” Even gen- tle old Dadu clings to “his most dignified self, the one who rejected the idea that his daughter could steal from the shelter.” Majumdar wants us to understand that they’re all guilty of that most human failing. “The needs of others were always smaller than the needs of one’s own child,” Dadu thinks. “Perhaps it was the strange distortion of the crisis, or perhaps it was simply human nature, that the pain of others was never as acute or compelling as one’s own pain.” Ma sees that competition in much starker, more frightening terms: “Hope for the future was no shy bloom but a blood- maddened creature, fanged and toothed, with its own knowledge of history’s hos- tilities and the cages of the present,” she thinks. “Hope wasn’t soft or tender. It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived.” I haven’t felt so unnerved by a novel since reading Paul Lynch’s “Prophet Song,” which won the Booker Prize in 2023. Ma- jumdar’s story may feel less terrifying than Lynch’s vision of our fascist future, but I fear hers is actually more ominous and more likely. “Prophet Song” – like Orwell’s “1984” – presumes ever stricter and more maniacal organization. Majumdar under- stands the way all the privations brought to a boil by rising temperatures could rend the moral bonds between individuals, setting everyone against everyone else in a desperate struggle for higher ground. The future, in other words, isn’t totalitarian; it’s chaos. -TheWashington Post By Ron Charles PHOTO:KNOPFVIATHEWASHINGTON POST Can The Dictionary Stay Relevant In The Digital Age? T his month, Merriam-Webster released a cheeky announcement of its latest product. In a video shared across social media plat- forms, the publisher boasted of “a power- ful tool that will change how you commu- nicate forever.” This new “large language model,” it said, doesn’t hallucinate, rely on a data center or use electricity. At the end of the advertisement, a female voice inter- rupted the faux-tech speak to deliver the punch line: “There’s artificial intelligence, and there’s actual intelligence.” We are, of course, talking about a book - the 12th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, to be precise. The iconic red reference book familiar to most Americans over age 40 is getting its first update in more than 20 years. The new version will be published in November. Merriam-Webster has been struggling to keep up with the evolution - or perhaps devolution - of the spoken and written word. One way it has coped is through humor. In the early days of the Trump era, the company’s social media account poked fun at President Donald Trump’s cavalier approach to spelling and vocabu- lary, attempting to offer definitions of some of the nonwords that turned up in his Twitter feed: honer, chocker, unpresi- dented. It was, on the whole, lighthearted, a response to the novelty of a regime in which political communications were suddenly, astonishingly unfiltered. But it was also a reminder of the dictionary’s role as the storehouse and arbiter of the national language. One of the ideas that comes across in Stefan Fatsis’s “Unabridged,” a warm, per- sonal paean to Merriam-Webster and its staffers, is how oddly this fast, witty public engagement sits with the traditional bread-and-butter work of maintaining the archive of the language as it has been used by Americans over the centuries. For all the sassiness of its social media presence, Merriam-Webster is still very much a company rooted in the traditions of the past two centuries. Arriving at its headquarters in Springfield, Massachu- setts, Fatsis notes the “throwback charm” of a mid-century office building: “Broad central staircase and dowdy conference rooms. Aging carpet and creaky wooden doors. Walls painted sanitarium green and cafeteria yellow.” At its heart, on the second floor, are 16 million three-by-five paper slips known as citations - or “cits” - containing examples of how each word in the language is used. It is, as Fatsis puts it, “the most comprehensive extant reposi- tory of the history of American English.” When NoahWebster published his American Dictionary in 1828, he declared it “not only important, but, in a degree necessary” that the nation should have its own dictionary. Webster had tinkered with spellings, streamlining them and bringing them closer to pronunciation than their British equivalents: plough became plow, draught became draft; words such as cen- tre, theatre and metre would have their endings inverted to -er; colour, rigour and honour would drop their u. In the preface By Dennis Duncan - Continued On Page 20