Fragmented: Kolkata in Pieces

Genre: Fiction / Novellas
ISBN: 978-93-92281-74-7
Published: 13 October 2025
Pages: 254
Binding: Hardbound
Published by: Virasat Trade

Kolkata is a city of many voices, and in Fragmented: Kolkata in Pieces, Sabarna Roy captures two of its most haunting. This volume brings together two distinct novellas – ‘The Alipore Chronicles’ and ‘The Monologue of a Serial Killer’ – each a portrait of the city seen through an utterly different lens.

In ‘The Alipore Chronicles’, four friends-Ayan, a stalled novelist; Rhea, a muralist chasing the truth in colour; Tara, a lawyer balancing activism with vulnerability; and Neil, a musician who wears his honesty in chords-come together to create a mural in Alipore. As coffee house conversations, rooftop songs, and rain-soaked walks bind and strain them, the mural becomes a mirror for their friendships, fractures, and hopes. When vandalism strikes, the project transforms into a public reckoning-about art, politics, and the city’s memory. This is Kolkata in colour: layered, political, personal, and unafraid of silence.

In ‘The Monologue of a Serial Killer‘, the city speaks in a darker register. The self-styled “Axe Ghost” narrates his decades-long string of murders-not for thrill, but for what he calls “equilibrium”. Moving through alleys, tram depots, riversides, and theatre wings, he studies his victims as much as he stalks them. But when Ira, a sharp-eyed archivist, begins leaving messages that trace his pattern, his solitary monologue becomes a dangerous dialogue. An imitator emerges, the lines between hunter and hunted blur, and the killer must confront the meaning of legacy, silence, and authorship.

Together, these novellas reveal a city that never stops listening. One story is about making something worth remembering. The other is about erasing what refuses to be forgotten.

Some walls bleed. Some voices kill. And Kolkata remembers them all.