AFTER MATRICULATING from the high school, Mohandas joined the Samaldas

College in Bhavnagar, where he found the studies difficult and the atmosphere
uncongenial, Meanwhile, his father had died in 1885. A friend of the family
suggested that if the young Gandhi hoped to take his father's place in the state
service he had better become a barrister which he could do in England in three
years. Gandhi jumped at the idea. The mother's objection to his going abroad was
overcome by the son's solemn vow not to touch wine, women and meat.
Gandhi went to Bombay to take the boat for England. In Bombay, his caste people,
who looked upon crossing the ocean as contamination, threatened to
excommunicate him if he persisted in going abroad. But Gandhi was adamant and
was thus formally excommunicated by his caste. Undeterred, he sailed on
September 4, 1888, for Southampton-aged eighteen. A few months earlier Kasturbai
had borne him a son.
The first few days in London were miserable. "I would continually think of my home
and country. . . Everything was strange-the people, their ways and even their
dwellings. I was a complete novice in the matter of English etiquette, and continually
had to be on my guard. There was the additional inconvenience of the vegetarian
vow. Even the dishes that I could eat were tasteless and insipid."
The food difficulty was solved when one day he chanced upon a vegetarian
restaurant in Farringdon Street where he also bought a copy of Salt's Plea for
Vegetarianism and was greatly impressed by it. Hitherto he had been a vegetarian
because of the vow he had taken. From now on he became a vegetarian by choice.
He read many more books on vegetarianism and diet and was delighted to discover
modern science confirm the practice of his forefathers. To spread vegetarianism
became henceforward his mission, as he put it.