ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the preponderant trope of the city shuttles between several positional ‘rhizomes’ and survives across different spatial coordinates and time axes, often (but not necessarily always) simultaneously. It critically analyses the configuration of a new-age ‘Kolkata’, besotted by land-sharks, that is real estate promoters and developers, who tamper with heritage conservation and sustainable urbanism and attempt reckless visceral vivisections upon the ‘sedimentary’, ‘rhizomatic’, and ‘palimpsestic’ hi-’story’-’city’ of the heritage megapolis. The symbolic edifice assumes a literal enunciation, as the Hotel Calcutta is under threat of inevitable demolition but can only be saved by a fictional preserve of its existing narrative. This is exactly the advice given by the monk who shows up to Peter Dutta, manager-cum-bartender, that a wall of stories around Hotel Calcutta - “one story, every day” (p. 14) - is the sole construct that shall suffer no wanton or malevolent deconstruction.
