Symbols A Guardian and a Thief Megha Majumdar

The Symbol of Passports in A Guardian and a Thief

In Megha Majumdar's novel, passports are far more than travel documents — they are concentrated vessels of hope, desperation, and bureaucratic power. The story tracks three sets of passports: the genuine climate visas stolen by Boomba, the forged replacements Ma acquires, and the originals that reappear too late. Each iteration illuminates a different layer of the characters' struggle against systemic barriers and scarcity.

What the Passports Are Literally

The passports are official international travel documents, issued by the US consulate in Kolkata. They contain visa stamps allowing Ma, her daughter Mishti, and her father Dadu to emigrate to Ann Arbor, Michigan. The official language inside them reads "allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance." But in practice, the documents become instruments of obstruction: without a physical copy, the family is stopped.

The forged passports are sophisticated counterfeits produced by an underground operation hidden behind a photocopy shop. The forger claims they "scan like the real things at the airports," and his records show seventy-five successful clients in two months. Yet even these carefully made objects require payment in gold — family heirlooms exchanged for a chance at passage.

Where Passports Recur in the Story

The motif surfaces at every critical turn in the narrative:

  • Day 1: Ma collects the genuine passports from the consulate.
  • Day 2: Boomba steals the purse containing the passports and discards them. Ma and Dadu visit the police station, then the consulate, where an officer threatens to cancel the visas.
  • Day 4: A "seller of tastes" mockingly suggests the passports have been used by others to reach England, sparking Ma's turn toward forgery.
  • Day 6: Ma collects the forged passports from the forger's shop, having traded her mother's gold bangles.
  • Day 7: The ironing man returns the real passports, found in a dump. Ma sees this as "Dadu's gift." But all flights to America are canceled due to protests.

Each recurrence shifts the passports' meaning and the characters' relationship to them.

How the Meaning of Passports Changes

The meaning of passports operates along three overlapping arcs:

Arc of hope: Initially the passports represent the tangible promise of escape — a future in America where Mishti will have food, safety, and opportunity. They are proof that the family's years of waiting have paid off.

Arc of obstruction: After the theft, the passports become symbols of administrative cruelty. The consulate refuses to reissue visas without a police report, and the police refuse to file a report, accusing the family of fraud. The system that was supposed to help them now traps them. Dadu bluffs he is a famous writer to buy time; the bluff works only temporarily.

Arc of moral compromise: The forged passports transform the object into a measure of Ma's descent into illegality. She pays with gold bangles, her mother's legacy. The forger's comment — "I might leave myself one of these days, you know. But I have the strangest fear that the forger cannot forge his own papers" — reveals the limits of even black-market ingenuity. When the real passports resurface, they seem like a miracle, but the cancellation of all flights renders them meaningless. The passports end as a punchline of fate: even the correct document cannot guarantee passage when the world has already moved on.

Character and Theme Connections

The passports bind together the novel's two protagonists and all its major themes.

  • Ma: Her journey with passports tracks her transformation from law-abiding mother to a woman willing to break the law for her child. She bribes a consulate guard, enters the "subterranean city" of forgery, and refuses a beggar on the night she collects the forged documents. The passports force her to choose: principled integrity or Mishti's survival. Her choice connects directly to the theme of moral compromise in survival.

  • Boomba: He discards the stolen passports because he cannot read their value. For him, food is the only currency that matters. His ignorance highlights the chasm between those who live with bureaucratic possibility and those who live under immediate scarcity. The theft itself stems from climate-driven hunger, linking to climate change and scarcity.

  • Dadu: His resourcefulness emerges when he bluffs as a writer to prevent immediate visa cancellation. His death on Day 6 frees Ma to fully prioritize Mishti, and she interprets the later return of the real passports as his gift. His connection to family love and sacrificial motherhood is indirect but crucial.

  • Themes: Passports crystallize the experience of immigration and displacement — the endless paperwork, the deferential pleading, the moment when official permission is granted and then snatched away. They also embody class inequality and charity as control: the rich can lose passports and still have lawyers; the poor have only one chance and must bargain for forgery with ancestral gold.

Study Questions with Answers

1. Why does Boomba discard the passports he steals?

Boomba lives in a world of immediate physical needs. When he breaks into Ma's house, he takes rice, lentils, and milk powder — commodities that keep his family alive for another day. The passports appear to him as worthless paper. He has no path toward legal migration, no understanding of the "climate visa" system that governs Ma's life. The moment dramatizes the class divide that runs through the novel: the same artifact that means salvation to one person means nothing to another.

2. How does the police station scene reveal systemic barriers to justice?

The police officer refuses to file a report, instead accusing Ma and Dadu of insurance fraud. He jokes with his assistant about other "clever" cases. The station embodies a logic that treats the poor as presumptive criminals. Without the report, the consulate cannot proceed. The episode shows how institutions meant to protect citizens instead filter out those without influence. Ma's subsequent decision to bribe the consulate guard is a grim education in how the system actually works.

3. What does the forger's line "the forger cannot forge his own papers" suggest?

The forger possesses the skill to create documents that fool airport scanners, yet remains trapped in the same collapsing city. His comment suggests that the underground economy, for all its ingenuity, still operates within the same power structures that keep its participants in place. He can facilitate escape for others but cannot extract himself. The line also hints at the psychological limit of forgery: one must stay close to the source materials, the original algorithms that make the copies seem real.

4. Why are the real passports returned only to have flights canceled?

The recovery of the real passports on Day 7 feels like a small miracle — Ma sees it as Dadu's gift from beyond the grave. But the cancellation of all flights due to protests after the hexagon looting reveals the fragility of personal solutions within systemic collapse. Even a valid document cannot guarantee travel when the larger infrastructure of transportation and governance has broken down. The ending of Day 7 shows Ma and Mishti joining a "tide of stranded travelers" walking back into the city, the passports useless in hand. The motif concludes by underscoring that documents derive their power from stable institutions; when those institutions fail, the passports become relics of a lost order.