In March, as the pandemic struck New York City, Sharmila Moonga was living on her own in Queens with a disability, when her food began to run out.
“You know, I tried to ring 311 and I couldn't get through to a person who would actually speak to me,” she said.
Moonga, a 53-year-old British Indian immigrant, has a type of cancer that’s left her with a compromised immune system and difficulty walking. She was scared of stepping out, even into her hallway. The couple of friends she would have turned to for help became ill. The supermarket around the corner stopped doing deliveries. And the gurdwara, or Sikh temple, she normally attended for services and for the occasional meal had suddenly closed.
“There were times when I thought I'd knock on the door or slip a note under somebody’s door and say, ‘I've run out of milk,’” she said. “I never, never built up the courage to do that. I felt vulnerable. I felt embarrassed. And I felt ‘I can survive this.’”
Unlike many other New Yorkers -- thousands of whom are now lining up at soup kitchens and pop-up food distribution sites across the city after the COVID-19 crisis left many residents without a job -- Moonga’s extended period of hunger wasn't caused by a recent job loss. Nonetheless, her story is symptomatic of the inadequacy of the nation’s social safety net, as well as the stigma of being hungry.
For a long time, Moonga saw herself as someone who was self-reliant.
“I was doing pretty good, you know? I was on a steady road.”
She moved to New York City in the late 1990s with her husband, settling down in Jackson Heights. She felt safe, blending in and loving that she could step out for an Indian movie, chat with friends, or grab a samosa.
Moonga had a career in education, helping kids with reading comprehension, first at private schools and then at an afterschool program. The work gave her purpose.
But things began to change in the summer of 2018, when she learned she had multiple myeloma, a kind of cancer, one that can result in weakened bones.
Listen to Arun Venugopal's radio story for WNYC:
In Moonga’s case, her ribs and hip had fractured. After hip surgery she was left with one leg that was shorter than the other. She can walk, but only with difficulty.
This March, her mobility wasn’t the only issue. Her marriage was too: she was separated from her husband. So when the city’s lockdown went into place, she was alone, but also determined to get through it and hesitant about asking for help.
“You have this certain amount of pride that you're doing okay,” Moonga explained. “You can manage this and on top of everything else, you don't want to say you failed as a woman, you failed in the food area. That was all it came down to: I failed to keep enough stock.”
The last thing she ate was some rice and daal. She spread it out over several days, eating small bowls. After she ran out of food, she drank water. Eventually the days and nights began to drift into one another. Moonga used to love to watch cooking shows on PBS, but she stopped because even her nightmares involved food.
“There is this huge apple pie and either I was chasing it or it was chasing me and we were trying to eat each other,” she said.
Every new day she had to face made her miserable. So she began to self-medicate, with a bottle of Vicks cough medicine. It put her to sleep.
“I was taking it every time I woke up during the day to kill the hours, to kill the hunger, just to kill time.”
The bounty of donated food Sharmila Moonga received on May 1st.
By Moonga’s own estimate, she went without a single meal for two weeks.
“It's like you're laying down, but you're floating and you're sinking and you're drowning,” she said. “You feel absolutely awful.”
Soon, she said, she grew sick of the taste of water.
“You know, the light bothers you, sound bothers you,” she said. “You just almost do want to be dead. You don't want to feel anything because you're so damn hungry.”
So hungry, she said, that she occasionally ate pieces of paper from a notepad.
“Facial tissue tasted better,” she said, with a small laugh.
Help came from a stranger. Sharmila had seen an offer on Facebook, from a group called the COVID Care Neighbor Network, to get free deliveries for those going hungry. It was run by Nuala O’Doherty Naranjo, a resident of Jackson Heights who is running for state legislature.
“And behold, she turned up with this whole bag of groceries, some olive oil, some packed food,” Moonga recalled. “And I said, ‘Oh god, that's like angels walking on earth.’”
The first thing she ate was plain bread. It wasn’t easy. Even milk had to be watered down.
Even now, six weeks later, Moonga is still recovering from her period of starvation. And she often wonders what she should’ve done differently. She wishes she had had a more extensive network of friends and acquaintances to rely on.
At the same time, Moonga feels angry and betrayed, because just when she needed help, there was no help at the ready. However, she wasn’t thinking about herself alone.
She said that when she received that first delivery of groceries, after many days of having nothing to eat, she didn’t keep it all to herself. She shared some of it with a neighbor, a man in his 80s who seemed, in her words, “too proud to ask.”
“I don’t think anybody in this day and age should be without food.”
