It’s set in Kolkata, India, a few decades out, under flood and heat and a food shortage that has markets selling seaweed and synthetic fish. Ma runs a shelter, cares for her elderly father and her two-year-old daughter, and has finally gotten the climate visas that will take the three of them to Ann Arbor, where her husband is doing medical research. The bags are packed. Then a young man named Boomba, who followed her home from the shelter because he guessed correctly that she was taking food from it, comes through the house at night and leaves with her purse and the passports inside it. The week that follows runs in two lines, Ma hunting the thief and Boomba trying to keep his own family fed, and Majumdar gives each of them enough reason that the moral ground keeps sliding.