Forever Hotel

This novel is a flawed, luminous, maximalist love letter to Kolkata’s layered soul

- Ruchira Gupta

SOME novels try to tell a story. Others try to build a city. Great Eastern Hotel, Ruchir Joshi’s second novel and most ambitious work to date, is unapologetically the latter—a 900-page fugue on memory, ruin, revolution, and the unending labour of understanding a metropolis that resists coherence. What Joshi attempts here is not just a story of Kolkata, but a reconstruction of its soul. As readers, we do not walk through this novel so much as haunt it—room by room, riot by riot, brushstroke by breadcrumb.

If Sacred Games was Bombay’s maximalist mirror and The Shadow Lines the map of Kolkata’s memory, then Great Eastern Hotel is Kolkata’s mosaic. It’s a book where chronology buckles under the weight of history and art, where the dead refuse to stay silent, and where the eponymous hotel—the former ‘Jewel of the East’—stands as both edifice and echo, repository and riddle.

At the heart of this grandly discursive novel is Saki, also known as Robi Nagasaki Jones-Majumdar, an architectural scholar and reluctant narrator tasked with cataloging the works—and life—of a man he can neither wholly admire nor fully escape: Kedar Nath Lahiri. Kedar is the novel’s haunted keystone. A rakish zamindar’s son turned painter, Kedar is colonial modernity incarnate—a multilingual, sensual, politically indifferent yet culturally voracious urbane man. A lover of women, music, and drink, he floats above the political tremors of his age like a flaneur with a sketchbook. His paintings—described but not exalted—are less masterpieces than symptoms. In fact, the most profound act of artistry Kedar commits may be his destruction of them. Kedar, Joshi insists, is not the artist; the city is.