He has also had to start free home delivery to fight off the take-aways I’m surviving he

He has also had to start free home delivery to fight off the take-aways “I’m surviving,” he says. “But it is not as profitable as before.” His problems have not been eased by the competition, which has continued to grow. The area now has eight Indian, three Thai, two Chinese, one Mexican and one French restaurant, as well as chip shops and take- aways.Hussain Ali, the Curry Cabin’s head waiter, is even more pessimistic than his boss. “People think we’re in a good business, but it’s very bad nowadays,” he says. “It used to be busy – now it’s terrible.”Ashraf Uddin, organising secretary of the Bangladesh Caterers Association, confirms that these problems are typical.

“It’s quite difficult to make a profit because the recession is still on,” he says. His association is concerned that some curry houses have been driven to offering half- price meals. This will affect the quality of the food, it says, and “will bring a bad name to our prestigious cuisine”.The best hope for the industry lies in the enterprise of the restaurateurs and their adaptability. In the Curry Cabin’s kitchen is a clay Tandoor oven, in which tikkas and naans are made. The Tandoor is not part of the Bengali cuisine – it comes from north-west India and Pakistan – but a restaurateur tried one out in the Sixties and found himself with a hit. Before long, a mass of Bangladeshi restaurants were reborn as Tandooris.

Now some Tandooris are in turn becoming Baltis – selling dishes whose origins lie in Afghanistan It is something of a con, it seems. “Baltis are not really any different from our cooking; they just change some of the spices,” Mr Uddin says.Some small chains have been built up, mainly by second-generation immigrants. But the great majority of restaurateurs are rubbing along much as they always have done – one family owning one restaurant. This fits with the Bangladeshi tradition of self-reliance that lies behind the industry’s past successes.A scattering of Indian restaurants appeared in Britain many years ago: the Salut-e-Hind, founded in 1911 in London’s Holborn, is believed to be the first.

But the foundations of today’s industry were laid in the Forties. Pople writes about places illuminated by the disjointed cultures they accommodate. Thus we have a European Roman Catholic Christ bleeding all over Manchester. There is an accurate and particular awareness of one holocaust or another running concurrent with domestic and regional coincidences: “F.15’s peel back the fabric of sky. Women call me/ remote.”Fisher is quoted in the back cover of Ian Pople’s The Glass Enclosure (Arc, pounds 5.95), praising Pople’s work, and you can see why. There is a tonic frontal sanity about Fisher’s work and his self-deprecatory humour can make the reader (this one anyway) yelp with laughter For instance: “Men call me Roy/ Fisher.