ABSTRACT
It is lunchtime late in the century before last and the young Indian man,
whom we must imagine standing hungrily on Farringdon Street, is not charmed by London. At least not today, Monday, October 22, 1888, a grey
day announcing the irrevocable onset of winter. In time, true to that psychic
distortion which makes us homesick for those places in which we were for-
eign, he will come to miss London bitterly. For the moment, however, his
homesickness is rather more conventional: an acute state of corporeal dis-
aggregation, a maladjustment of the body ill at ease among sofas, carpets,
cornices, porticoes, vestibules, flower-beds, pavements, morning suits, bread,
porridge and potatoes. Mostly bread, porridge and potatoes. For, to put it plainly, he is distraught about food, its lack and its unrecognisability. No
stranger to meat eating and its guilty pleasures, his sojourn has only been
authorised by the elders of his community under condition of a vow to abjure
the triple temptations of liquor, meat and sex, and so to suffer a staple diet of,
‘oatmeal porridge . . . bread, butter . . . meat and potatoes ad libitum’.1
