Hungry

There are things the statistics can’t tell you about hunger. How it smells, for one — like sour milk and musty hallways. Even how it looks: It isn’t just an exposed ribcage or sharp shoulder blades, it’s strange swellings and bruises and bald patches.

I’ve spent about two and a half years in India learning about low-income communities now, but I had never been around dozens of starving people at one time, in one space, until I visited the villages of Chhattisgarh in January. I watched in shock as young mothers stepped on weighing scales at the clinic, clocking in at 70 pounds in their third trimester. Sometimes I couldn’t even tell by looking at their faces, or their tiny bodies wrapped in bright saris. It was as if their bones were hollow.

At the hospital in Ganiyari that I’m visiting again today, it gets worse. Patients flood in with diabetes, malaria, tuberculosis and cancer, and hunger is simultaneously the cause and the symptom and the anti-cure. Chemotherapy drugs, for example, are calibrated by weight. For some, like the 66-pound woman with ovarian cancer I met today, doctors tell me the dosage their body requires is too low for the drug to be effective. My eyes sting. Can there be anything worse than finding out you can’t be cured from cancer because you’re starving?

This is a world where hunger is inherited, like a gene. A young mother admitted to the ward this morning had a hemoglobin count of 2.4 (the normal range starts at 12), and an underweight two-month-old son. The failure of the system was apparent, too, in the grooves of her mother’s collarbones. Three generations.

Years ago, I had a short relationship with hunger. I was 14, and some ugly confluence of insecurity, transition and fear spiraled into an eating disorder. It was hardly a year that I starved myself from 118 pounds to 80-something, but it was enough to know the quality of being hungry. The acrid taste that lingered in my mouth, the pangs from night to morning, the inability to fully experience joy or sadness. And while it was brief and self-inflicted, it left lasting scars on my mind and body.

Hunger made me angry then, and it makes me angry now. These families cannot be treated in a hospital. Their fate cannot be determined by charity, or cured like a disease. Their scars, unlike mine, are etched deeper every day. This is a global war with corporate food, greedy governance and apathy on one side, and them on the other.

I wonder which side has the strength to fight.