At just a hair more than 200 pages, “A Guardian and a Thief” manages superbly (and efficiently) to be many things: A beguilingly simple tale. A complicated morality play. A sensitive evocation of a time — the near future — and a place — Kolkata, India — during a period of flooding, drastic food shortages and heat like “a hand clamped upon the mouth.”

Most universally, it is a story of human imperfection, of bad acts done for virtuous motives. And it all arrives naturally in an eventful narrative marked by accumulation and loss. Majumdar’s brilliant choices result in what feels like the ideal order. Instead of feeling jerked around by plot, we are borne aloft by story.

Lots of novels twice as long have half as much heft.

There are four main characters: Ma, her daughter, Mishti, 2, and her elderly widowed father, Dadu, are preparing to leave India, and join Ma’s scientist husband in Ann Arbor, Mich. Boomba, a destitute villager who moves to the teeming city in desperate search of opportunity, robs Ma’s house one night.

Ma has a master’s degree and a good job managing a busy urban shelter, from which she pilfers donated food. She justifies her thievery as a means of providing for her daughter and her family’s emigration. At the same time, she is not too proud, in an unforgettable scene, to dig through a mountain of garbage, “a mean-eyed bird” in search of “divine documents” (missing passports).

In Ma, Majumdar creates the novel’s richest human, someone worthy of cheers and jeers: at once a fierce mega-mom and a petty criminal, practical-minded and often oblivious to her own collapsed ethics, indignant when she feels mistreated, defensive about her own lying and thievery.

The ceaseless urge to trade one’s native country for a supposedly better life elsewhere — today’s politically hottest potato — is gorgeously humanized. Dadu would rather stay in his beloved city full of laughter and “street corner philosophers” than live abroad where ”he would be a diminished version of himself.”

For Ma, emigration from famine-threatened India to America — “a country of grocery stores as large as airplane hangars, stocked with waxed fruit and misted vegetables” — is an alluring lifeline and her duty as Mishti’s protector.

Emigration will “put into action the beautiful ideal of hope,” Ma thinks, realizing at the same time that “hope for the future was no shy bloom but a blood-maddened creature, fanged and toothed, with its own knowledge of history’s hostilities.” I am tiger mom, hear me roar!

Boomba, too, labors mightily on the shifting border of criminality. He wants to bring his impoverished parents and young brother to the city for a better life. Careful what you wish for, Boomba.

As the wheel of fortune spins for Ma and Boomba, so do our sympathies for each of them. Majumdar, as readers of her bestselling debut novel “A Burning” will recall, is expert at creating likable people who end up doing unlikable things.

By the time the novel ends (and judgment about the ending is best left to readers, who will include those who love it and those who yearn for a different outcome), you feel you are in the hands of a writer with the fierce morality of a Joseph Conrad, the eye and ear of a poet and the toughness of someone who, like the guy on that dumb insurance commercial on TV, “has seen a few things.”

Majumdar offers readers the rare sophomore novel that outshines her justly celebrated debut. It’s a contemporary classic.

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A Guardian and a Thief

By: Megha Majumdar.

Publisher: Knopf, 203 pages.

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