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Negotiating Homelessness through Culinary Imagination: the
Metaphor of Food in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
Kalyan Chatterjee
Government General Degree College, Manbazar-II, Purulia, West Bengal
Abstract
This paper seeks to look at the culinary associations of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies to explore
the metaphor of food as it is employed by Lahiri to delineate different shades and nuances of the lives of
mostly the expatriate people, concentrating especially on how food negotiates the unease in living in an
adopted land. The first section of this paper introduces the critical issues related to food and eating, and the
second section moves on to the analysis of her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, relating the
stories to the issues discussed in the first section of the paper.
Keywords: Food, Diaspora, Indian American Diaspora, Jhuma Lahiri
Introduction:
This paper seeks to look at the culinary associations of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies to
explore the metaphor of food as it is employed by Lahiri to delineate different shades and nuances
of the lives of mostly the expatriate people, concentrating especially on how food negotiates the
unease in living in an adopted land. Although her fiction also represents people who are not
exactly dislocated, the questions of home, homelessness, displacement often lurk around them.
The first section of this paper introduces the critical issues related to the topic of the paper and
the second section moves on to the analysis of her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies,
relating it to the issues discussed in the first section of the paper.
I
Food, Memory, Nostalgia
Food, as Jon D. Holtzman (2006) rightly observes in his essay “Food and Memory”, is “an
intrinsically multilayered and multidimensional subject – with social, psychological, physiological,
symbolic dimensions…” (p. 362). The subject of food becomes especially significant in the context
of the diaspora, because food is, above everything else, “a vehicle for memory” (Holtzman, 2006,
p. 365). No wonder then the writings of diasporas are often full of references to food, feasting and
eating – nostalgic as they are – making food a veritable centre of attention for both the readers
and the critics alike. But ‘food’ as an issue in these writings has not only drawn a scrutinizing gaze
to them, but has also invited hostile criticism to diaspora fiction. Frank Chin, for instance, dubbed
much of contemporary Asian American women’s writing to be “food pornography” for their
deliberate over-use of a culinary idiom (as cited in Mannur, 2010, p. 15). However,
notwithstanding Chin’s opposition to this idiom, critics do not find such writings unjustifiably
soaked in nostalgia, as“…[T]he combination of the physical and the mental”, writes Supriya
Chaudhury (2011) in her introduction to Writer’s Feast, “in the longing for a lost cuisine, or the
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935), Vol. VIII, No. 1, 2016.
Ed. Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay & Tarun Tapas Mukherjee
URL of the Issue: http://rupkatha.com/v8n1.php
URL of the article: http://rupkatha.com/V8/n1/20_Interpreter_of_Maladies.pdf
© AesthetixMS
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Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, V8N1, 2016
attempt to recover it in a foreign kitchen, suffuses diasporic writing about food with a nostalgia
that exceeds its object: it is as though the absent homeland, like the absent real, lies behind the
imagined but unobtainable item of food” (p. x-xi). Anita Mannur (2010) in her book Culinary
Fictions has expressed similar opinion in this regard: “…among the most common of the complex
emotions food engenders for diasporic subjects is a sense of nostalgia…” (p. 20). And this nostalgia
is especially relevant in the context of the globalization and its corollary movements, dislocations
and disorientation, because: “Food, and especially nostalgia about home cooking, plays a crucial
role in anchoring us in a world that refuses to stay still” (Ray, 2004, Intro.). However, the memory
stirred in by food and its accompanying nostalgia can neither be simple nor be linearly related to
home, because “[m]emory is, Dipesh Chakrabarty stresses, “a complex phenomenon that reaches
far beyond what normally constitutes a historian’s archives, for memory is much more than what
the mind can remember or what objects can help us document about the past” (Chakraborty,
2002, p. 115). Food, therefore, “offers a potential window into forms of memory that are more
heteroglossic, ambivalent, layered, and textured” (Holtzman, 2006, p. 373). Lahiri’s fiction, we will
see, encompasses this complexity engendered by food, often to mark within the materially
prosperous life something amiss.
Food as Metaphor for Racial Identity and Multiculturalism
It is obvious that food as a metaphor is potent in its use in literature. Anita Mannur’s Culinary
Fictions (2010) is a work that has tried to explore some of these metaphors by examining the
dimension food has acquired in the migrants’ culture all over the world. Mannur has pointed out
in her introduction the multifarious significances food has acquired over the years in relation to
the diasporic – and consequently the racially other – population particularly in the West
(Mannur, 2010, p. 1-10). Mannur has referred to Lalit Mansing’s (former Indian Ambassador to the
USA) attempt at justifying the term ‘coconut’ – sometimes leveled on the diasporic Indian
Americans and South Asian Americans who are eager to assimilate themselves into the white
crowd of their new-found home despite their racial otherness reflected in their brown skin. In his
effort to do so Mansingadds an emphasis on the resilience of the coconut tree symbolizing similar
quality in the Indian Diaspora in America. The term ‘coconut’, however, as Mannur has pointed
out, holds an underlying sense of ethnic betrayal: trying to negate one’s racial identity by carrying
a white consciousness within the self. Secondly, Mannur has discussed the hotly debated speech
by the British foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who tried to portray CTM (the famed abbreviation
for ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’, an Asian food mistaken for a while as British for its huge popularity in
Britain) as an instance of British multiculturalism, as CTM, supposedly, demonstrates Britain’s
“ability and willingness to “absorb” and adapt the culinary histories of its immigrants and
formerly colonized subjects” (Mannur, 2010, p. 4). By pointing out the otherwise invisible cracks
in such apparent flexibility of the English culture, Mannur has dubbed Cook’s rhetoric as little
more than a “fantasy of British-style multiculturalism” (Mannur, 2010, p. 4). Finally, Mannur has
held that “For South Asian diasporic cultural texts, the “culinary” most typically occupies a
seemingly paradoxical space – at once a site of affirmation and resistance” (Mannur, 2010, p. 7).
Laura Anh Williams holds similar views on this issue, as she says: “In Asian American literature,
food as metaphor frequently constructs and reflects relationships to racialized subjectivity and
also addresses issues of authenticity, assimilation, and desire” (Williams, 2007, p. 70). Lahiri’s
fiction dwells on these dilemmas and paradoxes as the analysis of her short stories and novels will
show.
199 Negotiating Homelessness through Culinary Imagination: the Metaphor of Food in
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
The Unique but Gendered Act of Cooking
John Krebs in his Food: A Very Short Introduction (2013), on the other hand, has endeavoured to
divide food into three categories (cooked, farmed and preserved) to understand the relevance of
food in the evolutionary road undertaken by the homo sapiens; and it is interesting to note the
importance that has been bestowed on ‘cooking’ as it left “profound impacts not just on our diet,
but also on our anatomy, brain, and social life” (Wrangham as cited in Krebs, 2013, p. 7). No
wonder “Charles Darwin thought that cooking, after language, was the second greatest discovery
made by man” (Krebs, 2013, p. 7). In a similar fashion, James Boswell thought man’s uniqueness
lies in its being the only “cooking animal” in this planet, as “no beast is a cook” (as cited in
Wrangham, 2009, p. 10). Wrangham, however, considers “the control of fire and the advent of
cooked meals” to be the “transformative moment that gave rise to the genus homo” (Wrangham,
2009, p. 4). In his book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009), Wrangham suggests
that the advent of cooking freed up men by providing them with extra time for hunting or even
leisure, and most of this was possible because of the less chewing time for the softened up cooked
food. But for women cooking did just the opposite: it trapped them into a job that restricted them
from much of the external world. The gendered discourses on food and cooking are significant in
that they relate to the world Jhumpa Lahiri creates in her fiction with food, a considerable
amount of which are found at the kitchen. They are food ready to be cooked, or just cooked to be
served hot the Bengali way or, occasionally, food of the third variety that Krebs talks of – the
preserved foods, which signify, more often than not, a departure from the customs of an Indian
home where most of the eatable items are cooked fresh by convention, including the famously
simple Indian bread known as the chapathi. The second section of this paper will relate these
issues to Lahiri’s short story collection Interpreter of Maladies.
Food, Sex/ Sexuality
In his essay “Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective”, Robin Fox (2015) has included a
section on “Food as Seduction” analyzing food’s association with sex and sexuality (p. 11-12). Fox
begins the section invoking the analogy between the praying mantis, a species whose female
devours its male partner after mating for nutrition, and human beings, who more or less expect
its males “to make some show of feeding to be acceptable” (p. 11). In fact, Fox argues that “The
males and females of all species…seem to be involved in this mating gamble with food as the bait”
(p. 11). Fox finds food and sex “closely linked”, as “[t]hey are physically linked in the limbic system
of the brain, which controls emotional activity generally” (p. 11). It is for this association probably
the ascetics prohibit gluttony or any pleasure of the food. However, Fox holds that for production
the female needs provisioning, especially during the suckling period, and as a natural response to
this need, for the female of our species, “a male’s willingness to provide food” becomes an
important index of his suitability as a mate” (p. 11). Fox has also mapped the male-female
courtship through the choice of setting for food: first date – a crowded public place like disco or
bar. The second date moves to a restaurant where the male pays the bill showing his eligibility
and the next setting comes when the couple decides between “your place or mine” for lovemaking which is closely followed by a breakfast, and if the relationship gets serious “the next
important ceremonial meal is likely to be with her family” (p. 11). Fox ends the section by invoking
the example of “the film Tom Jones, where the marvelously sensual meal becomes both a prelude
to, and an analogue of, intercourse” (p. 12). The analogy between food/ eating and sex/ sexuality is
not infrequent in academic and critical discourses, however. Malthus, for instance holds that
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“[t]he most powerful of all desires is the desire for food, closely followed by the passion between
the sexes” (as cited in Zwart, 2000, p. 121). In the second volume of History of Sexuality, Michel
Foucault holds that in ancient times “food ethics was no less prominent than, and existed side by
side with, sexual ethics and medical ethics…” (as cited in Zwart, 2000, p. 114). Lahiri’s stories and
novels invoke this association subtly on several occasions, as we will see in the second section of
this paper.
Exile
As we speak of food, the word ‘home’ keeps appearing at regular intervals, because ‘food’ serves as
a bridge between the state of exile and the ‘home’ the migrant characters of Lahiri left behind. In
fact, the issue of ‘exile’ is unavoidable in dealing with the literature of the diaspora, because “…a
whole genre of twentieth century literature is ‘extraterritorial’, a literature by and about exiles,
symbolizing the age of the refugees” (Steiner as cited in Said, 2001, p. 174). The state of exile is
compelling rather than convenient, because, as Edward Said has aptly observed, exile is in no way
“a matter of choice: you are born into it, or it happens to you” (p. 184). That is exactly so, as exile,
although one kind of dislocation in being “a consequence of [both] willing or unwilling movement
from a known to an unknown location” (Ashcroft et al 2004, p. 73), is markedly different from
other such similar states, like the one of refugee or of an expatriate or that of an émigré. The
distinction of exile from the other forms of dislocation is perceived by Said. According to Said,
exile stands out for carrying with it “a touch of solitude and spirituality” (p. 181). The exile also
stands out for suffering under the constraint of an unwilling movement from home, which is
unlike an expatriate who is definitely dislocated by choice; and the exile is, also, considerably
different from an émigré, who ‘may’ have been dislocated by choice as well (Said, 2001, p. 181).
Beginning his edition of The Oxford Book of Exile (1995) with the Biblical episode of God’s
banishment of Adam and Eve from Paradise resulting in mankind’s perpetual exile on earth, John
Simpson states the obvious to probe deeper into the collective experience of exile:
Each of us is an exile: the thought is a hackneyed one, but it still retains a little force. We
are exiles from our mother’s womb, from our childhood, from private happiness, from
peace, even if we are not exiles in the more conventional sense of the word. The feeling of
looking back for the last time, of setting our face to a new and possibly hostile world is one
we all know. It is the human condition; and the great upheavals of history have merely
added expression to an inner fact. (p. vii)
Simpson’s view on exile as a universal experience amplifies the scope for analyzing the note of
sadness that runs through Lahiri’s fiction notwithstanding the difference that, according to Said,
exists between someone who is displaced by choice and someone who is not. Lahiri’s stories, as
though, would gaze at a gray zone between the so called ‘choice’ and ‘unwillingness’, as the
infinite complexities of a human mind will playfully topple the hierarchy that Said creates by
romanticizing the state of an unwilling mover. Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies explicitly manifests
the pangs Said speaks of when her characters are exiles. But, at the same time, Lahiri’s characters
resist the strait-jacketing of terminologies like ‘expatriates’ and ‘émigrés’ by bringing into play a
cultural context not entirely familiar to the theorists of the arena; for instance – the Indian
marriage that always puts a woman in exile, without ever acknowledging it. It is possible, because
in India (or in the East) the marriage is supposedly done with the consent of the woman, although
the displacement – as a given consequence of a marriage – is covered up by the heavy machineries
of patriarchy running clandestinely right from the birth of a girl-child through even lullabies, folk-
201 Negotiating Homelessness through Culinary Imagination: the Metaphor of Food in
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
tales and rhymes. Lahiri’s fiction shows the suffering the characters in exile undergo in countless
ways, and, as in the case of Mrs. Sen, sometimes they reflect powerfully through food-motifs.
Home
The significance of home and homelessness in the context of the migrants’ lives is at once
acknowledged in what Krisnendu Ray writes in his The Migrant’s Table (2004): “We are forever
mired in polarities of dread and desire for home and homelessness” (Intro). Although considered
to be a complex blend of language, custom, climate, landscape, people, history and probably
many more things, the concept of ‘home’ has become further complicated due to the mass
movements of people caused by the globalization and the formation of diaspora. Benzi Zhang in
her article “The Politics of Re-Homing: Asian Diaspora Poetry in Canada” (2004) has
problematized the concept of ‘home’ in relation to the diaspora. According to Zhang, ‘home’, for
the diaspora, is no longer fixated in space or time, and the diaspora’s pain is not a direct result of
its ‘dehoming’ but an expression of its ‘re-homing’ desires: a perpetual throe for the imaginary.
“Reconfigured between fact and fantasy”, Zhang writes, home “is no longer a closed familiar place,
but rather a dialectic sphere open to crossroads, or a shifting terrain related to far-away
memories, or an ahistorical moment that has both passed and not yet arrived” (p. 105). Much of
Lahiri’s fiction will dwell on these issues, and much of these concerns will reflect through her
characters’ penchant for food, feasting and eating, as we will see in the following section.
II
Interpreter of Maladies
The descriptions of food often have within them subtle hints of sexuality. It is not particularly
extraordinary, as Supriya Chaudhury (2011) points out that “gastronomic and sexual appetites are
frequently fused together in literary evocations of eating” (p. xiii). Food’s association with
sexuality is there for obvious reason as sex and food, Mary Douglas (2014) points out, have both
social and biological components combined into it (p. 61). In the food the migrant pines after
Chaudhuri (2011) also sees his/her homeland which is ‘always out of reach’ (p. x-xi). Jhumpa
Lahiri’s first published collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), manifest both
these aspects of literary representation of food. Out of the nine stories contained in this collection
“A Temporary Matter”, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”, “Interpreter of Maladies”, “A Real
Durwan”, “Mrs Sen’s” and “The Third and Final Continent” are especially important for their
references to food and eating.
“One thing that made him feel productive”
The collection opens up with “A Temporary Matter” which is a story about a young couple –
Shoba and Shukumar by name – drifting away from each other after Shoba gives birth to a still
born. Strangely the growing estrangement and increasing silence between the couple allow a
proportionate increase in Shukumar of a knack for cooking. “Shukumar enjoyed cooking now”,
because “It was the one thing that made him feel productive” (Lahiri 1999, p. 8). The growing
attention to food also covers up the way the home the couple once chose to be together in is
falling apart. And behind the silence and pretensions of togetherness Shoba, Shukumar finds out
later, has been looking for an apartment to settle down without Shukumar. With the revelation of
Shoba’s intention food and cooking turn out to be little more than an illusion that sustained
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Shukumar till truth forced its way to him through a confession-game they play during evenings of
temporary power-cuts caused by a snow-storm. Throughout the story the reader shares with
Shukumar his utter discomfort in sharing a home with Shoba. The feeling is so strong in
Shukumar that he takes shelter in a part of the house which is the least likely to be visited by
Shoba: the room where they planned to put their baby. Shukumar’s cooking spree is a desperate
attempt at covering up this unease in living.
“Knowing a land and/or a country means tasting it”
In “When MrPirzada Came to Dine” an émigré from the erstwhile East Pakistan, Mrpirzada, seeks
the warmth of home in his frequent visits as a guest to a Bengali family. The family consists of a
couple and a child. The friendship among the three adults is seen through the eyes of the little girl
of the house, Lilia. Although culturally undistinguishable, the three adults, Lilia is told by her
father, are from two different countries: India and East Pakistan. The latter within the course of
the story emerges as a new nation called Bangladesh. In her effort to figure out the difference
between her parents and Mr. Pirzada, Lilia is distracted in her studies at school library and leaving
her project she finds books on Pakistan and studies them:
I returned to the blond-wood shelves, to a section I had noticed labeled “Asia”. I saw
books about China, India, Indonesia, Korea. Eventually I found a book titled Pakistan: A
Land and Its People…I began turning the pages, filled with photos of rivers and rice fields
and men in military uniforms. There was a chapter about Dacca, and I began to read about
its rainfall, and its jute production. (Lahiri, 1999, p. 33)
Interestingly, Lilia’s awakening of the consciousness of the cartographic space can be linked with
her eating a piece of candy every night, which she does as part of her prayer for the wellbeing of
the family of Mr. Pirzada. The gradual melting of the chocolate in her mouth may well be a
metaphor for knowledge unfolding, as “Knowing a land and/ or a country”, writes Lorenzo
Pavolini, “ means tasting it, savoring it…In this literary assonance between knowing and savoring,
tasting and creating, enjoying food and enjoying speech, is to be found the inner nature of our
outlook” (Lahiri, 1999, p. 50).
Call of the exotic, the quirky
“Interpreter of Maladies” depicts a young diasporic couple consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Das visiting
India, their ancestral land, with their three children. Though they belong to the second
generation diaspora in the USA, they appear hardly distinguishable from any other foreign
tourists to their tour-guide-cum-driver, Mr. Kapasi.Food as a metaphor is in operation here as
well, although with a lesser number of references in comparison to the stories set in America.
Food, in this story, can be divided into two categories: food from Indian origin and food which are
not. The gum the children chew is of the latter category as is the coffee, the preparation of which
leads Mrs. Das to an adulterous sexual union with her husband’s friend from India, ultimately
resulting in her bearing a child by him. The Punjabi friend of her husband “made love to her
swiftly, in silence, with an expertise she had never known…” (Lahiri, 1999, p. 64). This fascination
for the unfamiliar (represented by the unknown Punjabi) corresponds with Mrs. Das’s strange pull
for the puffed rice she keeps munching all through the story especially when this food is not
considered as a delicacy in India and is more of a cheap food for the plebian. Perhaps, it’s the
quirkiness of this food that draws her to it and charms her, just as that extramarital sexual
experience did “without the meaningful expressions and smiles Raj [her husband] always insisted
on afterwards” (Lahiri, 1999, p. 64). This story with its undercurrent of sexuality right from the
203 Negotiating Homelessness through Culinary Imagination: the Metaphor of Food in
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
start (with Mrs. Das’s Shaved legs seen through Kapasi’s eyes, the eve-teasing of hers in a roadside stall, Kapasi’s thoughts on his frustrating sexual life with his wife, the sexually charged
symbol of the monkey recurring sometimes amazing and sometimes threatening the group and
finally the secrets revealed before Kapasi about the adultery) has a kind of unsettling/ disturbing
charm to it which is quite unlike the other stories of the collection. Apart from adultery the story
has as its central theme the discomfort Mrs. Das carries within her, something she expects to be
cured by Kapasi. The naïve expectation of Mrs. Das from Kapasi propels us to assume that Kapasi
may here be symbolic of the ‘home’, reaching which can allay all discomfort and sickness.
“Gustatory nostalgia”
“A Real Durwan” is about an old pauper woman (Called Boorima), who resides in the stairs of a
multi-storied apartment inhabited mostly by petty-minded lower-middle-class people of different
ilk. The woman is an exilic who was forced to leave her native land and re-locate to Calcutta by
the infamous partition of India in 1947. As a result of that the exilic traits are manifest in her
character without any ambiguity. Her reminiscences of the past are full of exaggerations that
tickle her audience and sometimes irritate them as well. Interestingly, most of her rumination is
related to food and feasting, grand as they used to be in “those days” exposing a tendency which is
quite natural in an exiled person like Boorima, as Holtzman (2006) terms this tendency as
“gustatory nostalgia” or “food-centered nostalgia [which] is a recurring theme in studies of
diasporic or expatriate populations” (p. 367). The exaggeration in it is quite natural, because
“[w]illfulness, exaggeration, overstatement: these are characteristic style of being an exile…” (Said,
2001, p. 182). The old lady is, however, evicted from the apartment when she is caught in the
cross-fire of petty quarrels and jealousy among its dwellers. Against the backdrop of the
destitution of the exile of Boorima, the story exposes the hypocrisy and meanness of the lowermiddle class urban people.
“Dehoming and rehoming”
The use of food as a metaphor in “Mrs. Sen’s” is stronger than most of the other stories in the
collection. Irma Maini, in her article “The Politics of Home and Food in Jhumpa Lahiri’s
Interpreter of Maladies” (2007) has restricted her analysis within two stories of the collection:
“Mrs. Sen’s” and “When MrPirzada Came to Dine”. Maini finds in the displaced house-wife of Mr.
Sen, a university professor, an erosion of identity leading to a lack of self-worth in Mrs. Sen, a
troubling feeling that makes her grope for means that may restore them. Cooking for her is that
means:
Lacking a sense of identity in this new country, it is vitally important for her to hold on to
her memories of a time when she was somebody. However, instead of just remembering
the past, Mrs Sen uses the past to give meaning to the present by preparing and cooking
foods of her native Bengal…Cooking is one activity Mrs Sen takes pride in; this is what
gives her a measure of self-worth in a country that sees her as an outsider. (Maini, 2007, p.
158)
Maini has pointed out how through food her political state within the American society as a
“cultural outsider” is accentuated. And hence, for Maini, cooking to Mrs Sen is a reaction to this
experience of exclusion. In Kalyan Chatterjee’s “The Representation of Fish in Jhumpa Lahiri’s
‘Mrs Sen’s’: A Study in Exile” (2011), however, Mrs Sen’s cooking is more a response to her state of
exile from home than her inability to blend in or find self-worth in America. In this essay,
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Chatterjee has principally focused on ‘fish’ as a metaphor for home for this exilic character,
pointing out the apparently great amount of emotion invested upon the food. Fish and rice being
the quintessential part of the Bengali life she misses and ruminates before the little American boy
Eliot, Mrs Sen tries to construct home through cooking them; especially the fish. The desperation
that drives her to do something she detests the most, namely driving a car, is unaccountable
unless we accept that fish (she was driving to get fish from a faraway market) is more than a mere
food item to her. It is emblematic of home she is estranged from under compulsion of an Indian
marriage that comes with compulsory dislocation of a woman from one’s own home. Food and
cooking in this story again, thus, bring out the unease of living in an adopted land.
Measuring time with “each meal” eaten
“The Third and Final Continent” is a nostalgic rumination of the journey undertaken by the
narrator from India to America through England, covering virtually three continents. The
struggle, success and transformation that he went through are at the center of the story, and it is
interesting to note that food all through this course of his journey has been a marker of his state
of being. His days of austerity, his acquaintance with a new world, his gradual progress toward
solvency are marked by his eating habits. Even the honeymoon is, among other ventures, an
exploration for places that sold fish or bay leaves and cloves. Quite normal again, as “the gustatory
[is] central to the creation of memory, ranging from the sensory clues the shops evoke, the
cultural mnemonics of the commodities purchased, and how the goods acquired allow for
practices that foster historically validated forms of identity” (Holtzman, 2006, p. 367).The story
ends on a note of amazement at the recollection of the journey (that is life) undertaken; and,
again, time spent on this course is measured with, among other things, meals eaten. The
metaphor of food, thus, asserts its presence all through this collection of short stories by
negotiating the pangs of homelessness through representations of food, cooking, feasting, eating
and not eating.
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Kalyan Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of English in the WBES and is at present the Head of the
Department of English at Government General Degree College, Manbazar-II, Purulia, West
Bengal. Previously, he was the head of the Department of English at Jhargram Raj College and
Government General Degree College, Singur, Hooghly and served as Assistant Professor of
English at Hooghly Mohsin College and as Lecturer in English at Sri Ramkrisna Sarada Vidya
Mahapith, Kamarpukur, Hooghly. He received his Ph.D. Degree for his research work on the
writings of Jean Rhys from the University of Burdwan.