Chai With Priya A very likely not-so-distant future

On Sunday afternoon I was sat on my sofa, soaking in the last hours of the spring sunshine, talking about a dystopian novel where climate change and inequity wreaked havoc.

The book in question was Megha Majumdar’s latest novel, A Guardian and a Thief.

This is a dystopian novel based in India which follows the lives of Ma, her widowed father, Dadu, and her two-year-old daughter, Mishti, who are preparing to flee from a climate and scarcity crisis which has hit Kolkata in India.

On the day that they receive their passports from the American Consulate with their climate visas in place, their house is broken into by Boomba who steals the documents along with some food.

The book follows the lives of both Ma and Boomba over the course of the week as their stories are intertwined and they fight for their families’ survival.

I finished the book earlier late last week and had to sit with it for a few days, mulling the fact that though this was fictional, it was not something that is unlikely to happen.

With warnings of climate change and how the world is changing on a yearly basis, it is no longer something we can avoid.

Descriptions of empty streets in the novel, void of pedestrians and traffic made me think back to just six years ago when the Covid-19 lockdowns were implemented.

The word “unprecedented” was used to describe that time in our lives.

Main Street felt apocalyptic, with shops and restaurants closed and only a few people in the street.

Staying at home means more people turned to social media to connect with the world, and while at first it felt wholesome I have recently been feeling overwhelmed with the amount of devastating content I see online.

My social media feed is filled with footage of children dying in various wars, people starving, sexual assaults, shootings, blackouts for citizens and electricity for hotels, and so much more.

We live in a global world where when the act of war happening in one part of the world affects everything from the price of food, oil, and everything else.

The floods and climate issues in Majumdar’s novel brings her characters into an extreme crisis, and what we all agreed in our book club discussion was that this no longer feels like it is unbelievable.

We can empathise with the characters in the novel while also being able to place their circumstances to what we can see happening across the world today.

It also made me wonder what would we do in Gibraltar if we were faced with such a crisis.

As a community we have always taken pride in how charitable we are, but what happens when the choice of being able to feed our families is taken away from us simply because nothing is available?

A scene where Ma and Dadu go to the black market to look for vegetables and are only offered seaweed by the vendors that made me think of what happens when the scarcity is so bad that choice has been taken away.

It’s the complete opposite when Boomba and Mishti attend the billionaire’s private island for a public feast where all sorts of foods, including fish and vegetables are on offer for all to enjoy.

With survival on the mind, will morality gets pushed out of the equation and we do all that we can to survive.

How would present-day Gibraltar deal with such scarcity?

It took me back six years ago during the pandemic where people queued for hours to get into supermarkets, and even the most basic of good such as toilet paper and bottled water was rationed.

It also brought to light the closed frontier days during Franco’s regime, where fresh fruit, vegetables and meat were scarce, and dependent on imports by boats into Gibraltar.

This book places both characters, Ma and Boomba, in the position of the guardian for their loved ones, but also in the position of the thief, once again for their loved ones.

Neither character was wrong and nor were they correct, and they are victims of circumstances beyond their control.

But their actions bring to light how far they would go for survival.

We live in a world where actions taken by the political class beyond our shores have repercussions on our every day lives.

The war in Ukraine saw an increase in the price of wheat flour and sunflower oil, the war in Iran has shaken up petrol prices, and Brexit has changed and will change so much on the Rock.

And while I am grateful that we are blessed with the protection from extreme devastation in Gibraltar, it is books like A Guardian and A Thief that allow me to connect with victims at a very human level.