{"id":121556,"date":"2025-10-14T14:22:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T14:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/121556\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T14:22:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T14:22:15","slug":"read-this-pulse-quickening-opening-scene-from-oprahs-119th-book-club-pick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/121556\/","title":{"rendered":"Read This Pulse-Quickening Opening Scene from Oprah’s 119th Book Club Pick"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the storeroom hidden under the stairs, Ma fetched a cup of rice and a sack of eggs speckled gray like the moon, then cooked, standing before the stove\u2019s blue fire, her eye upon the window and its dusk, in which bats swooped and the neem tree shivered and a figure down on the road pedaled a bicycle, whistling, as if everything was all right.<\/p>\n

Thief, thought Ma. Who else but a person who had chanced upon fresh vegetables or fruit would wander the city of Kolkata in this ruined year, the heat a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one\u2019s head, and recall a song? She watched to see what the thief would do. He pedaled past. But Ma saw a different reality shimmer into being, in which he leaned his bicycle against the wall, climbed the pipes like a toddy tapper, and appeared at her window. In that picture, the thief was a collector of local information, dutiful in his neighborhood eaves-dropping, shrewd in following what he heard about the bins of onions and carrots, the sacks of lentils and rice, the bags of raisins and cashews hidden in the dark fist of the house, stolen by Ma from donations made to the shelter where she worked, while the city outside wept for a handful of something to eat.<\/p>\n

There was\u2014in the label accepted by the region\u2014a shortage.<\/p>\n

In the year prior to this day, farmers across the region had fallen, their bodies running fevers in air that no longer cooled. In the croplands, among stilled machines, pests had traveled from acre to new acre, savage in their feeding of grains. In the west a drought had cleaved riverbeds and in the east salt water had tainted the paddy fields. In the city, those who walked to the neighborhood markets with umbrellas in their hands and wishful lists in their pockets, broad corners torn from the newspaper with writing in Bengali\u2014cabbage, ginger, lychees if they were good, ice cream, half loaf of bread\u2014found the roads alongside which the markets usually sat, its baskets and tarps invading, rickshaws and cars sounding their horns, slow shoppers inspecting the purple shine of eggplant and pressing guavas hard as hail, instead completely empty, nothing but some onion peel scattered at the edges where the pavement gave way to earth, where on most days goats and cows might have nudged the soil for something to eat. But those animals were gone too.<\/p>\n

\n

in seven days, she would be aboard a plane grading upward, its motion so beyond human comprehension that it would feel like stillness. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It had happened before. 1770, when crops failed and smallpox plagued the enfeebled. 1876, when drought struck the Deccan Plateau and the British continued to export what grain remained. 1943. Those black-and-white newspaper photos, in which people appeared as sunken eyes and twig-thin limbs, facing a photographer who could do nothing for them, their fullness\u2014their love, their humor, their annoyance, their preference\u2014pared by the lens to reveal what remained, which was hunger.<\/p>\n

The eggs clacked against one another in the turbulent water, the rice grew earthen and buttery, and Ma gathered in her hands a kitchen towel with which she would lift the pot lid before her, hot enough to pass for a weapon. But what would the thief have done had she, instead, glanced at him as if he were a returning member of the family, and told him with her mother\u2019s authority to wash his hands and sit at the table? In fetching him a plate, who might she have become?<\/p>\n

Ma shook her shoulders free of the distress. She did not need to put herself through such exercises anymore. She was leaving in seven days. Only seven days: It was close enough on the calendar to cast its glow over the whole week. Everything was in order. She had hired a new manager for the shelter; she had convened and concluded a final meeting with the board. The shelter, which had been her life for the past decade, would carry on without her, and she would begin a new life, perhaps at a new nonprofit, in Michigan. It was relief. It was even thrill.<\/p>\n

After dinner on this day, she would go to the American consulate at the appointed time and collect the passports with climate visas inside, treasure beyond her greatest hope. And in seven days, she would be aboard a plane grading upward, its motion so beyond human comprehension that it would feel like stillness. Impossibly, the plane would speed through a night of sleep like sand blown in her eyes, toward a sunrise bright as iron poured upon the horizon, and finally, it would arrive in the United States. She knew plenty about America. Who didn\u2019t, given Hollywood? It was a country of grocery stores as large as aircraft hangars, stocked with waxed fruit and misted vegetables and canned legumes from floor to ceiling. 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 tenacious thinkers. It was a country of encompassing 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 country of opportunity for her child.<\/p>\n

Ma\u2019s husband had moved six months ago for a research position on mosquito-borne diseases at a laboratory in Ann Arbor.<\/p>\n

While settling in his new position, contributing to a healthy savings account, and searching diligently for an apartment suitable for all of them, he had also put the paperwork in place to bring his wife, child, and widowed father-in-law over. He had purchased the plane tickets and helped secure climate visas, a long process of supplication in both America and India before various bureaucrats who believed themselves gods. Before such interrogation, his standing as an urgently needed scientist had favored Ma and Dadu; the family\u2019s middle-class savings and ownership of the house had favored them; luck had favored them. All Ma needed to do was survive these seven days.<\/p>\n

A Guardian and a Thief, by Megha Majumdar<\/p>\n

\"<i>A<\/a><\/p>\n

Excerpted from A Guardian and A Thief by Megha Majumdar. Published October 2025 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright \u00a9 2025 by Megha Majumdar.<\/p>\n

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