At 3 AM, We Judge Others to Avoid Our Own Hunger
The biscuit crumbles between my teeth like ancient prayers—sweet, stale, and somehow necessary. 3:17 AM. The kitchen clock’s red digits burn through the darkness as I reach for another, my fingers already sticky with guilt and graham flour. This isn’t hunger. This is archaeology of the heart, excavating comfort from processed wheat and palm oil.
Through the window, I see Mrs. Rahman from 4B walking toward the corner store, her dupatta pulled tight against the winter air. Ice cream at midnight again. My first instinct isn’t empathy—it’s the quick, clean judgment that springs from some primitive part of my brain: Why can’t she control herself?
But my hand freezes halfway to my mouth, another biscuit suspended in accusation.
When did I become this creature that devours in darkness while condemning others for their identical desperation?
“Baba, why do people eat when they’re not hungry?” Arash asked me last week, watching his mother bake her anxiety into elaborate sweets whenever examination results are delayed. From the mouth of children comes the question we spend lifetimes avoiding.
Because we are animals pretending to be angels, I should have told him. Because we evolved to survive famines that may never come, but not the emotional droughts that arrive with each dawn. Our ancestors hoarded calories; we hoard sensations—the momentary sweetness that promises our hollowness will be filled.
The Quran speaks of two types of hunger: al-ju’ and al-ghalaba. The first is physical emptiness, the second is the overwhelming need that devours us from within. Medieval Islamic scholars understood what modern psychology is only beginning to grasp—that humans hunger for things that food can never satisfy, yet we keep feeding the wrong mouths.
I remember my mother’s last days, how she would ask for sweets she couldn’t taste, her tongue too damaged by medication to detect sugar. But she kept asking, kept chewing, because the act of consumption was the only language left to say I am still here, I still need, I still exist.
“Tomar ma’r moto khabar ichche hoy,” Happy said to me once—you crave food like your mother did. She meant it kindly, but the words struck like diagnosis. We inherit more than features and temperament; we inherit the specific shapes of our hungers, the precise methods of our self-soothing.
But inheritance explains only origin, not perpetuation.
Why do we become executioners of our own species? Why do we look at Mrs. Rahman’s midnight pilgrimage and see moral failure instead of recognizing the sister-hunger that drives us both into fluorescent-lit stores, seeking solutions in the freezer section?
The answer lives in that terrible moment when self-awareness collides with self-loathing. To acknowledge her hunger would mean acknowledging mine. To forgive her would mean forgiving myself. And forgiveness—true forgiveness—requires admitting we are not the masters of our own appetites, not the choreographers of our own desires.
“Allah does not burden a soul beyond what it can bear,” the Quran promises, but what of the burdens we place on each other? What of the weight of perpetual judgment we pile onto shoulders already bent beneath private struggles?
I think of the evolutionary paradox: we survived as a species because we learned to share resources during scarcity, yet we’ve created a culture where sharing our emotional scarcity—admitting we sometimes eat our feelings—becomes shameful, something to hide behind midnight grocery runs and 3 AM kitchen raids.
Perhaps our judgment of others’ appetites is really grief disguised as superiority—grief for our own lost innocence, for the child who ate when hungry and stopped when full, who never had to negotiate between what the body needed and what the heart was screaming for.
The biscuit package lies empty now, crumbs scattered like evidence of my temporary betrayal of my own standards. But I don’t feel shame anymore—I feel recognition. This too is prayer, this desperate attempt to fill the unfillable with something tangible, something immediately available.
In the morning, I will see Mrs. Rahman again. Our eyes might meet across the courtyard, two midnight hunters returned from their separate expeditions. And maybe, just maybe, instead of judgment, I will offer the smallest nod—one archaeologist of the heart acknowledging another, both of us still digging, still searching, still desperately, beautifully human.
The clock now reads 3:42. Dawn is still hours away, but something in me has already begun to brighten.
