A Lesson in Hunger

When on the eve of March 24, 2020, the Indian Prime Minister announced a countrywide lockdown to fight COVID-19, a population of 1.38 billion Indians became aware of the distance between their mouths and their bellies; between the cities where they worked and the villages they had left behind. With no means of public transportation, a deluge of starving migrant workers, abandoned by the wealthy and the middle-class employers, began fleeing from the cities at the risk of police brutality and possible arrest. Around the same time, the well-to-do vectored toward shops and round the clock grocery chains, feeling estranged from their neighbors whose company had fostered security of upward mobility. Outside one such grocery store, I waited with my mask on and my feet neatly inside a yellow circle drawn on a broken pavement- the new sociality of distancing. I found myself looking back. To the figure of a rikshawala, waiting to find if someone will forget the virus temporarily and use his vehicle. To my father and his parents who scavenged for work, offering their labor in exchange for rice or raab (sugarcane syrup) during famines in colonial India while large-scale food exports rationed Britain. I touched my mask unconsciously, hoping that it stood firmly between the past and the present, a “debt we pay to human guile” (Angelou, n.d.).

It was the third week of the lockdown. The news of hunger trickled through newspapers available (only) on smartphones, while big and small grocery stores began experiencing shortage due to broken supply chains. A collective feeling of scarcity and deprivation began to take shape in the minds of several patients, reminding me that there is no trauma that is outside the individual’s omnipotence (Winnicott, 1960). An upper-middle-class female patient who repeatedly finds herself caught in a conflict about material success to keep her parents proud and happy at the cost of personal meaning and connection with the world shares a nightmare: “I a