Portrait of a Thief

Definitely more of a 4.5 and I'm rounding up.

Even though I was immediately taken in by the premise of this story when it was first announced, it took me a long while to actually get to it. Meanwhile, I read both glowing and not so glowing reviews about it, adjusted my expectations, and hoped that I would get to it someday. Finally the time came when my friends chose it as a pick for one of my readathon prompts and I had no reason to put it off anymore. And this turned out to be an experience I can't accurately describe.

The first thing I realized while reading this was that promoting this majorly as a heist novel was a mistake. Yes we have a crew of friends and yes they plan and execute multiple heists, but frankly those are a minuscule part of this book. This story is so much more - it's about friendship and family, it's about grief and loss, uncertainty and fear, home and belonging, country and culture, past and future - and how each person is shaped by each of these things. This story is less about the actual heists and more about the motivation behind it, why the characters agree to it, what drives them, what they hope to achieve and if they actual end up getting what they want. It's about feeling the pressure of the eldest child bearing the weight of the family's expectations and never being enough; it's about comparing yourself to your elder brother and trying to one up him in every aspect but not feeling satisfied by it; it's about not being able to communicate the love you have for your family; it's about being born and living all your life in a country but being made to feel like you don't belong; it's about doing everything right and as expected but still feeling unfulfilled; it's about wanting to escape from the small life you have but not knowing where to go next; and also ultimately about feeling the trauma of the legacy of colonialism even when you are generations away from it, and wanting to reclaim those losses in whatever small or big ways you can.

I'm not an American but I live here; I'm an Indian but I don't live there. Being an immigrant is always straddling two worlds and at times feeling closer and farther from both. On the other hand, despite not having any background in art nor having a creative bone in my body, I absolutely love being in the midst of an art museum and just imbibing it all. While visiting the Met was an amazing experience, I didn't know how to feel when I saw the many Indian artifacts, some chipped and broken, because while some may have a clean provenance, I'm not sure of everything. And I know that it's been more than 75 years of independence, and I don't even have any personal stories shared to me by my family about life during colonial occupation, but it's still a legacy that's left an indelible mark on our society and upbringing and culture, and maybe I can't change anything about it, but I can still let myself feel the pain and loss of that history while reading stories like this, and hope that there are people like these characters irl who will do something to get back some of India's looted art back home - because while we can never erase the mark of colonialism, this small reclamation can still be powerful.

I feel like I've gone on a tangent and I didn't even write about the characters. But I don't think I can. There were parts of each of them that felt like me, and parts of them I hoped were me some or the other time in my life. I loved them and felt for them and wanted to be with them. And everything else is too personal for me to share in a review here.

I haven't felt this difficult to write a review in a long while, for a book which had so many elements I loved, living breathing characters who felt so close to me, a full cast audio narration which was amazing, and ultimately full of heart and feelings which were too relatable. I don't know who to recommend this book to but if you are belong to the diaspora, I'm sure you'll find something in it for you. Can't wait to see what the author writes next.