Sri Lanka Dispatches, vol. 1

A week of living dangerously

I remember my first trip to Sri Lanka. It was December of 2000, and the country was still engaged in a decades old civil war. It was eye opening and a little bit disconcerting for me to experience sandbagged army checkpoints and soldiers with automatic weapons on the streets. But I never experienced outright violence or felt personally threatened. In the summer of 2020, during the unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, I witnessed some of the same things, but much closer to home: police barricades, the National Guard on street corners, buildings on fire, and nightly curfews. It was hard to believe, and for the first time, my own home felt fragile and volatile. So it was with a changed perspective that I returned to Sri Lanka last week with the country locked in political turmoil with curfews, social media blackouts, and news reports of nightly protests and mass arrests.

We landed at Bandanaraike International Airport in the wee hours last Friday morning, having flown for 25 hours via Philadelphia and Doha on Qatar Airways. Our drive from the airport was oddly quiet, the roads largely empty. Our driver told us the city was under a curfew after a protest near the president’s house turned violent, with vehicles burned and people beaten and arrested. I was not so naïve as to think all would be smooth sailing here this month. COVID, an over-leveraged economy, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine had conspired to create dire fuel and food shortages, which spun off into long power cuts. We were braced for some inconveniences and sweaty nights without a fan, but within the first few hours, it was already turning into something more.