Janice Pariat writes about her food adventures as a student in Delhi and later, in London

Pushed by a vague feeling of “I must be elsewhere” – common to many youngsters from India’s Northeast – propelled by the sense that employment and higher education opportunities lay “outside”, or as we say in Khasi “sha the”. There. Not here.

I left for Delhi University, and lived in a girl’s hostel where, for two years, we ate the most unexciting of vegetarian food. I remember rajma, chole, roti and rice, and I don’t think the menu varied in all the time we were there. It was a shock in so many ways. The flavours of the food, the flavours of the city. Harsh, unfamiliar, barely accommodating. If we wanted our own “home” food, we needed to trek for miles, from North Campus to South Delhi, and eat at a Naga stall in Dilli Haat. Unlike now, where neighbourhoods like Humayanpur burgeon with “Northeast restaurants”, the early 2000s offered few options if any. Our only respite was cooking at a friend’s flat – a friend who wasn’t living in a hostel but on their own, usually a group of boys from the Northeast – and many Sundays were spent preparing and eating pork.

Eating out in Delhi, though, was very much a question...

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