# Hunger In The Time Of Isolation The first thing that disappeared was the taste of salt. Not salt itself—there was plenty of that in the kitchen, in the ceramic jar with the blue rim that had belonged to my mother. But somewhere between the pantry and my mouth, salt lost its purpose. It coated my tongue like dust, like the memory of flavor rather than flavor itself. I noticed this on a Tuesday. Or perhaps it was a Wednesday. The days had begun to blur into one another, distinguished only by the pattern of light through the kitchen window—a pale gold in the morning, white and harsh by noon, amber as old whiskey by evening. I had stopped marking them on the calendar. What was the point? Each day repeated itself like a prayer no one was listening to anymore. The isolation had been going on for—how long now? I had lost count. Three weeks? A month? Time moves differently when you are alone with four walls and the sound of your own breathing. It becomes elastic, stretching or contracting without warning. You might wake up thinking it is dawn and discover, several hours later, that it is still early morning. Or you might blink and find that an entire afternoon has vanished into the gray space between waking and sleeping. My neighbor, Mrs. Chakraborty, had warned me. "Stock up," she had said through the grille of her window, her voice thin and reedy. "They are saying no one will be allowed out for a while. No one." She had stood on her balcony in a faded green sari, her gray hair pulled back so tightly that her skin seemed stretched across her skull. I remembered thinking how old she had suddenly become—when had that happened? Just last month, or so it seemed, she had been different. Softer. But perhaps that was before. Before everything changed. I had listened to her, more or less. I had bought rice and lentils and flour. Onions and potatoes. Things that lasted. Things that did not demand attention or care. But I had not bought enough tea, and that became the first real problem. The tea first, then the salt. Then, gradually, everything else. By the second week—or was it the third?—I had stopped cooking proper meals. What was the point of elaborate dishes when there was no one to cook for, when there was no one to appreciate the effort? I made simple things: rice with a little ghee, lentils boiled soft, sometimes an egg if I could convince myself that the slight sulfurous smell that came from the kitchen was not a sign that something had gone wrong. The egg had looked pale and strange that last time. I had thrown it away half-cooked. Instead, I began to eat bread and butter. Bread and jam. Bread and whatever was left in the small containers at the back of the refrigerator—things whose origins I could no longer remember, things that had begun to develop a film of whitish mold that looked almost delicate, like lace. I would scrape it off. Or sometimes I would just eat around it. What difference did it make? The hunger came slowly at first. It was not the kind of hunger that makes you desperate or drives you out into the world. It was a hollow, persistent hunger—the kind that lives in your chest and reminds you, hour after hour, that you are still here, still alive, still in need of something that cannot quite be named. I tried to remember when I had last eaten a proper meal. Not just bread. Not just lentils. Something with spices, something that required attention and time. The memory felt like it belonged to another life, another person. Had I ever actually made the aloo dum that my mother used to make, with potatoes and yogurt and those seeds that crackled when you dropped them in hot oil? Had I ever actually tasted that, or was it just a story I had told myself so many times that it had become indistinguishable from memory? The refrigerator had begun to sound strange. A low, mechanical hum that seemed to say something in a language I could almost understand. I opened it less and less frequently, and when I did, I tried not to look too closely at the corners, at the shadows where things accumulated. The light inside was harsh and white, and it showed too much. One morning—a Tuesday or a Wednesday or perhaps a Sunday, it hardly mattered—I opened a tin of sardines that I had found at the back of a cupboard. The smell that rose from it was sharp and overwhelming, a smell of the sea and of metal and of something ancient. I had taken one look and put the lid back on. I could not eat it. The smell alone seemed to fill my mouth, my throat, the whole kitchen. I had put the tin away and made tea instead. Or tried to. The tea bag had begun to crumble as soon as the hot water touched it, and the water turned a pale, weak brown, like the color of old photographs. The hunger remained. In the afternoons, I would sometimes stand at the window and watch the street below. There were few people now. The vegetable seller who used to come every morning had stopped coming three—no, four—weeks ago. The milk boy with his aluminum can had disappeared. Even the crows seemed to have left, or perhaps there were fewer trees for them to live in. I could not remember when I had last heard them. Across the street, I could see another building, similar to mine. Gray concrete, small windows like closed eyes. In one of the windows on the second floor, someone moved sometimes. An old man, I thought, though it was difficult to be sure. We had never made eye contact, but I would see his shape moving behind the glass, and it was a comfort somehow. To know that someone else was there. That I was not the only one. I wondered what he was eating. The thought came to me one afternoon as I was making water with turmeric in it—not quite tea, not quite anything else—and it stayed with me like a small, persistent stone in my shoe. What was he eating? Did he have a kitchen like mine, with a refrigerator that hummed strangely and cupboards that grew emptier each day? Or did he have supplies? Had he been more careful, more foresighted than I had been? It was a ridiculous thought. What did it matter to me? And yet, over the next few days, I found myself thinking about it more and more. I found myself paying more attention to that window, waiting for him to appear. When he did, I would feel a small, sharp relief, as if I had been holding my breath. It was absurd. I was alone in a building with perhaps a hundred other people, and I was thinking about a stranger on the other side of the street. But then again, alone was what I was. Alone and hungry, though not in any way that food could fix. The strange thing about isolation is that it does not feel the way you think it will. You imagine silence, emptiness, peace perhaps. But what you get instead is the sound of yourself—your breathing, your heartbeat, the small noises that your body makes when you are not trying to hide them. You get the sound of your own thoughts, which are louder than any external noise could ever be. The walls began to speak to me around the third week. Not in words, but in a language of cracks and shadows. There was a crack in the plaster near the bathroom that had begun to spread, branching out like veins or roots. I watched its progress with the attention of someone watching a slow-motion film. Each day it seemed to have grown a little. Each day it spread further. I had stopped opening the windows. The air outside smelled strange—chemical and empty in a way I could not quite explain. It was better to keep the windows closed and breathe the stale air inside. At least that was familiar. At least that was mine. One evening, I found myself standing in the kitchen at nine o'clock at night with no memory of how I had gotten there. I was holding a glass of water. The water was warm. I did not remember filling it. I stood there for a long time, looking at the glass, trying to understand what had driven me from whatever I had been doing in the other room. Hunger, I thought. But it seemed like more than that. The next morning, I discovered that the rice had run out. I could not remember eating it all. I had been so careful, rationing it, measuring out each cup with a precision that bordered on obsessive. And yet here I was, looking into the bottom of the container, seeing nothing but a fine powder of rice dust. There was flour. There was still flour. I could make bread. Or a simple paste with water and salt. Both seemed equally pointless. Instead, I made tea—a real tea, using one of my precious few remaining bags. I had been saving them, but for what? For a celebration that would never come? For visitors who would never arrive? The water was hot, the tea was fragrant, and for a moment, as I held the cup to my lips, I felt almost like myself again. Almost. The tea tasted like sadness. That afternoon, I saw the old man again. He was sitting on his window sill, which seemed impossibly small, impossibly dangerous. How was he not falling? I watched him for a long time, my tea growing cold in my hands. He was very still, barely moving. I wondered if he was dead. The thought came without warning, without particular distress. He is probably dead, I thought, and soon no one will know. Soon the building will be full of them, all of us dead in our separate rooms, and no one will come to take us out for a very long time. The idea should have been horrifying. Instead, it felt almost comforting. A kind of certainty. A kind of ending. But then he moved. Just slightly. A shift of his shoulders. A turn of his head toward the window. For a moment, I thought he was looking at me. For a moment, I thought he could see me looking at him. For a moment, we were not alone. I raised my hand slowly, not quite waving. Just a small movement, a sign that I was here, that I existed. He did not respond. He remained perfectly still, his face in shadow, his form almost immaterial against the darkening sky. I lowered my hand and went back to drinking my cold tea. That night, I realized that I had not had a proper meal in five days. Maybe six. The hunger was still there, persistent and hollow, but it had changed shape. It was no longer a physical sensation, something that could be satisfied by food. It had become something else entirely. A hunger for voice, for contact, for the simple experience of being acknowledged by another human being. I stood at the window in the darkness and looked across the street toward where the old man had been. The window was empty now. The building beyond was completely dark. I could not even make out the shape of it anymore. I had an urge, suddenly overwhelming, to call out. To press my face against the glass and shout, to fill the silence with sound, with proof of my own existence. But I did not. Instead, I stood there in the darkness and remembered the taste of salt. I remembered the smell of my mother's kitchen, the sound of lentils boiling, the way her hands had moved as she stirred the pot, quick and certain. I remembered being hungry then too, but it had been a different kind of hunger. A hunger that could be satisfied. A hunger that made sense. The morning came—gray and indifferent—and with it, the realization that I was still here, still breathing, still waiting for something that I could no longer name. The isolation had become complete. Not just the isolation from the world outside, but the isolation from myself. I was two people now: the one who existed in memory, who tasted salt and smelled turmeric, who knew what hunger meant; and the one who stood at the window in the growing darkness, who had forgotten what food tasted like, who was not even sure if she was alive or if she had already become like the old man across the street—a shape, a shadow, something no longer entirely real. The hunger remained. It would, I thought, remain forever.