I measure every Grief I meetWith narrow, probing, eyes—I wonder if It weighs like Mine—Or has an Easier size.I wonder if They bore it long—Or did it just begin—I could not tell the Date of Mine—It feels so old a pain——Emily Dickinson, “I measure every Grief I meet”Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived.—John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as PhotosWriting my dissertation in my small studio apartment in Edinburgh in 2005 involved Post-it notes pinned on walls and doors, fluttering down out of order when a door was closed too quickly and too hard. I pinned this quote from John Berger above my desk. Throughout my academic life, I have been obsessed with the relationship between personal and collective histories as they become situated and experienced in the intimate, domestic, and familial. I know this question is hardly original; it powers much of the social sciences and humanities. Nonetheless, it has always felt like the needle in my heart.I didn’t acquire this obsession at universities. Universities were places of pleasure and pain, where I discovered both that my mind could be a place of rest and refuge and that I had to learn different personas to manage my interactions with others. I didn’t invite anyone from university to my home. I talked around the pasts I kept to myself as if they were secrets. I was always the native in my anthropology classes, adjacent to what was talked of, trying to reclaim the talking. Instead, I carried my obsessions, these questions, well-worn and warmed by my skin, from my childhood in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and my adolescence in East London in the UK. To my reader: I was a refugee from Sri Lanka learning to live in London from 1990 onward—a ten-year-old who arrived from a war zone with my elder sister and father, a father who had to start again, growing into an adolescent who lived interminably in the immediate moment, weighed down by what seemed unbearable and fearing the future at every turn. I still experience anxiety as imminent catastrophic doom, everything in my world ready to dissolve and be destroyed in an unanticipated instant. To myself, the writer—now, when I think of that adolescent, I have learned to regard myself with a love I couldn’t summon at that time. I reach back to you to hold you. As an adolescent, I didn’t know whether I wanted to run away from Sri Lanka, where danger was ever present, or go back home to others whose lives resembled my own. The profound grief I felt was mingled with a burning desire to live. The adults in my life were themselves bleakly living through lives that were just one step at a time. We were scared of others in the community yet craved to meet Sri Lankans. Our dissident circles were small, other families we all trusted. I understand isolation through this craving for the closeness we felt.On March 16, 2020, my fortieth birthday, the lockdown was announced in the Bay Area in California. I was in the grocery store in a queue that grew as people panic bought. It was an event that announced itself as such. I found myself trapped again, not in the newness of events but in the oldness of my feelings. I grew up in the Sri Lankan civil war in northern Jaffna, a Tamil, the child of two people who were so involved in politics that the twists and turns of Sri Lankan politics seemed like the twists and turns of my own life. A family that could only explain its pain by beginning with a story of the nation and its violence. This is what it felt and feels like to be a refugee. I have chased, in other people’s lives, in books, in sentences, the knowledge that war finds itself lodged in our intimacies. Of those I knew in London, the Iranians, the Kurds, the Kosovans, the Sri Lankans, the Iraqis, and the Somalis, we would begin our own stories by retelling our unofficial histories of our countries. I so wished for another story. But what minority now in Sri Lanka can start with just an individual’s story first? At the party to celebrate my marriage, my father stood up for his speech. In the middle of his speech, the story he told of me was about when he, my sister, and I entered the UK with our visitor’s visas at the immigration counter. He had told the immigration officer we would be there only for a visit. Then I began pulling at his hand, saying, “Thatha, Thatha” (“father” in Sinhalese) insistently. Then I had asked him why he was lying, because we had come to stay forever. He had tried desperately to hush me. This story he told came in the middle of a beautiful and meaningful speech, but it was unconnected to anything said before and after. None of our guests noted it. My sister and I immediately recognized it as the story we could never leave. It was not only a story of how we came to be, just for us three, but also a story of that which haunts our lives. Woven into every moment of making, our unmaking.That relationship between personal and collective histories is something almost all academics working on Sri Lanka, whether from there or not, reckon with. In everything we examine, connected to violence or not, Sri Lanka’s many-layered histories of violence come back to us. For example, the anthropologist Vivian Choi, in writing about post-tsunami warning systems in Sri Lanka, describes what she calls “anticipatory states,” where anticipation works upon landscapes and imaginaries layered by multiple experiences of violence (“Anticipatory States”): a social milieu that “was already one in which ‘living’ was characterized by this sense of danger” (Choi, “Infrastructures” 97). If I think of my preoccupation with the personal and the collective, which I imagine in the image of a braid, then Sri Lanka’s histories of catastrophic events seem to be like a geological rock, layers and layers pressed upon each other. I borrow this geological turn from the historian Reinhart Koselleck (3–4). The simile makes these layers separate, experienced at different periods, and distinct, but what we all know is that they feel heavy in our lives; it feels like these events happen all at the same time. In Sri Lanka, our layers can be laid out as a list and feel like a drowning. A thirty-year civil war. Ongoing antiminority riots against first Tamils and now Muslims throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, Sri Lanka had the highest number of deaths proportionate to its population in the world. The second highest rate of missing people, or rather disappeared people, in the world, continues today, even after the end of the war. An expanding military infrastructure threatening to subsume the state and popular life. Sri Lankans can describe both the sense of ever more weighing them down and the sense of time cycling back. For minorities in Sri Lanka, the antiminority violence is unending but cyclical. It feels new (What is happening now? Can you believe this?) and old (How can we be returning to the chauvinism of the 1980s? Does nothing change?). These sorts of statements mingle with greetings, middles of conversations, refrains, fillers for pauses in conversations. In between these phrases, alarm, disappointment, fear, and catastrophe fall invisibly. Now the pandemic, hospitals, and sudden deaths are woven in with military reprisals, arrests, prisoners in terrible conditions, and economic collapse as Sri Lanka runs out of dollars and food prices rise dramatically.Since February 2022, Sri Lanka has been on an emergency footing: chronic economic mismanagement by its ruling regime, corruption, massive financial debt, and expansion of the defense budget after the end of the war while welfare-state provisions remain depleted. A ruling party constructed around a family of brothers responsible for war crimes committed under their direction in 2009 as president (then, until May 2022, prime minister) and defense secretary (now president). In 2019, this government ran on a campaign called “vistas of prosperity and splendour.” By March 2022, this was being pilloried as “vistas of loot and plunder.” The pandemic affected Sri Lanka’s big earner, tourism, which had been used to mask such an indebted economy. By February, the foreign reserves had been drawn upon so extensively that there was too little left to pay the country’s constant debt. People wait for hours in queues for gas canisters to cook and fuel for vehicles, including the small three-wheel Tuktuks that many depend on for transportation. Food prices, as I write in mid-2022, have risen by 40 percent.Sri Lanka is starving. Sri Lankans are starving. I cannot write this sentence without tears in my eyes. On Twitter, people debate: Is this the worst Sri Lanka has been through? Are these the longest protests? Surely, that honor is reserved for the hundreds and hundreds of days of protest that the families of the disappeared—enforced disappearances—have launched since the end of the war in 2009. Even as some mothers and fathers die from ill health, old age, stress, and unbearable grief, families of the disappeared have refused to let anyone forget their children, spouses, and siblings, demanding from the state that they tell the families where they are.But here in 2022, through these months, Sri Lankans have been protesting daily across the island. They have come out in most towns. They have formed a permanent protest site in central Colombo at Galle Face Green. When Colombo was still a shabby-genteel city, Galle Face Green was an open space on Colombo beach, which was considered a public space. Although the beach is fringed by posh hotels, nonetheless, in the evenings, families went to fly kites, walk by the beach, and enjoy congregating. Marginalized from these public pleasures as Colombo grew more and more exclusive, since March 2022, the protests have reclaimed this space for libraries, food tents, speeches, debates, and songs. The protesters refuse to go while the Rajapaksa family clings to power. Sri Lankans are not protesting for the world, because the global media and global attention, whatever that may mean, is indifferent. Few people ask me about Sri Lanka in the United States, even among those who are attentive to global matters. Sri Lankans are protesting for themselves. They are each other’s public. That means an open discussion of ethnic majoritarianism; it means that sometimes protest sites are full of Sri Lankan flags, but also sometimes people question what they never have before. It means that there is some conversation in these protest sites and on Twitter and social media about violence against minorities. The future is so very bleak economically for Sri Lankans. These protests are the fire that reminds us that in bleak futures, we all need to know that we didn’t accept it. That people still believe that what they do and say can shape their realities. Sri Lanka is starving. Yes, those in the former battlefields of the north and east know what that means and they know that others conveniently ignored them. Here we are. I longed for the vaccine when Sri Lanka could not get supplies. It came. Now, what is there to long for to fix everything else? The protests have ended, many are now arrested. But the memories cannot be undone. There are no fixes. But there is each other. Our lists of our violence. Our layers.Koselleck describes how we can experience events as singularities, though such experiences of the singular change over our lifetime as we incorporate and reflect upon events through past experiences (3–9). Koselleck argues that such singularities are themselves structured by structures of repetition, from the mundane repetitions within everyday life to the largest structures that make events possible. He asks how to think about ways of reckoning with how those structures of repetition change. I have always been fascinated with Koselleck. He writes with the backdrop of his own experiences as a young person in Nazi Germany, where pain, suffering, war, and trauma were inflicted, lived through, and unequally racially distributed.1 Unacknowledged in his writing (as with other European writers) are the colonial histories that were fresh and formative but made subterranean in a solely European story and European theory. As this special issue points out, our pandemic stories are inflected with familiar inequities. Economic collapses in the Global South, the effects of inflation on goods and foodstuffs, rising fuel costs, and extreme weather is naturalized while being simultaneously pored over in the United States. The North’s affliction is catastrophic; the Global South’s endemic. Old narratives about eradicating refugees and migrants are recycled into epidemiological phrases.The global pandemic offers itself to us as images of maps, colored in gradients. Charts of rising and falling lines. Stories of frustrated movement. In between, glimpses of the stories of migrants detained, drowning, living, and fueling electioneering. Geographies of migration are often arrows drawn large to indicate population movements, but in experience, they are lines, waiting, detention centers, and stuckness. In these geographies, cycles of detention continue because those are the world histories already sedimented in place, little affected by the pandemic. Border closings and fraught journeys are presented as pandemic effects. Undoubtedly, they are. But this is a long history for so many—the migrants, the refugees, the asylum seekers, whatever the press want to call them. These epidemiological languages of infection grow on still concurrent ways of talking about migrants. Observations about languages bite into me like stories I am forced to bear.In mid-2022, the British Home Office announced its intention to house asylum seekers not in Britain but in Rwanda, with whom it has signed a deal to house asylum seekers while their cases are being processed.2 It began in June 2022. Increasingly, European countries are invested in offshoring asylum procedures. This removes the rights given to refugees by the International Refugee Convention to claim asylum in the country they seek refuge in. This is a continuation of successive governments in the UK intentionally creating a “hostile environment” policy for migrants and asylum seekers.3 The hostile environment has sought to criminalize and deport the Afro-Caribbean Windrush generation, not just the most recent entrants to the UK; it has expanded its scope to cover the past as well as the future.In a call with my sister Narmada, she tells me off. She has been working and organizing against Britain’s 2021 Nationality and Borders Bill. I, like many others, have been outraged by a Clause 9 provision that suggests that individuals from Britain’s ethnic minorities could be stripped of our citizenship without notification.4 I have tweeted about it, which my sister has seen and is exasperated with. My sister points out that I am getting upset about something, Clause 9, that might affect me now as a citizen, but the most draconian provisions of this bill affect asylum seekers and immigrants.5 It will make only some pathways legal, denying most their full rights under the 1951 Refugee Convention. Many applicants from countries the UK now considers “safe” will be inadmissible. Arriving in the UK without entry clearance will be a criminal act punishable by prison. Helping any asylum seeker arrive, whether irregular or not, can also be criminalized. The bill proposes to offshore asylum applicants. Focus on that, my sister tells me. Britain is criminalizing every route into Britain. We would have been criminals, she says, under this bill for arriving on a plane with my father and then declaring our intent to seek asylum at the airport. Here we are again, the three of us, at the airport on December 26, 1989. The immigration officer asks us why we have come to the UK. My father says for a visit. I tug at his hand. Unmaking, making.For my American readers, you have already allowed this criminalization and offshoring to happen; your protests are about events, as structures have been changed. My sister, whenever I ask her for advice, tells me to find and speak with my own truth. All my life, I have only learned because of her. My story illustrates my life; it gives it the structure and shape by which my heart measures its needs. Speaking my truth means understanding that my story has little in common with the straitened and ever more traumatic circumstances that migrants face, which intentionally strive to make their journeys and refuge as traumatic as that which they flee. This is irresolvable in a world where conflict and catastrophic environmental transformations promise more migration, not less, not least because the countries refugees flee to are deeply imbricated in the conflicts and privations they flee from.I suspect that this present demands less that we search for what we all hold in common than that we ask and act to counter the effects on those who are deeply marginal. These effects come to public attention only if presented in deeply personal terms. We force others to tell again and again their personal stories and promise to listen only some of the time, if at all. As many commentators repeatedly remind us, the current pandemic feels so personal, but it is so very structural. We can get to some of that collective story through our personal experience, but that does not bring an understanding of that which remains an unfamiliar experience or ethical or political responsibility. I tell my story because it is my own. This essay is about how a life can bring together many layers of histories and violence, but, in the end, cannot tell the stories of the pressing needs for justice, accountability, and transformation without attention to the sharp gradients of power that scaffold those stories. Telling my story cannot even resolve my own loneliness.The transformations Sri Lanka needs are being articulated by its mobilizations right now. These are mobilizations that, for once, come wrapped not only in a Sri Lankan flag and the disappointments of ethnic chauvinism, as many popular mobilizations have done. The protests these months have instead steadily and strongly borne the weight of witnessing together in the dark, some forms of collectivity.As I write this, the third year of the pandemic stretches before us. I have come and gone from Sri Lanka to see my father through illness. Here come the pandemic essays that bring together that sense that so many of us already experience with elderly parents and loved ones as our bodies and their bodies change, mutate, transform into the dark terrain that this pandemic has made a certainty. The first time I flew back to Sri Lanka after ten years in the UK, and every time for the first ten years afterward, I cried as we began to land and the plane swooped over the familiar red roofs, ocean, and palm trees. I cried the first time I returned to northern Jaffna, to my family home, my grandparents waiting for me. The war was still on then; it was a temporary ceasefire. Now, I sleepwalk through my everyday life in the United States, glued to Twitter for news from Sri Lanka. Reading what I can. Watching videos. The tears that come in the shower. The calls I make home. The calls I do not, because I can’t find the hour that I need to make the call and then postpone it to the next day and then to the next. I am a place of regret. But I am not there. I am not there. I am not there. Sri Lanka is starving. The Britain I knew presents its most brutal memories to me in this present. I have to work to remember the love I found in it, but I did that too. The two places that I tell as my origin myth. This is my pandemic history. The fear and longing that drives me out of the plane, the burst of hot air at the airport, reminding me of the alien familiar. The guilt, always of having survived, of leaving. Of knowing that every arrival promises a departure.I am grateful to the editors of History of the Present and the special issue editors, Anjali Arondekar and Sherene Seikaly, for asking me to be part of this process. Anjali, in particular, has held my hand throughout and encouraged me to reach into myself to write something personal and difficult. I am ever grateful for her as a friend and model. I also want to thank Thomas Blom Hansen for his support for this and everything I write. This short piece is dedicated to my father, Dayapala Thiranagama, and my sister, Narmada Thiranagama, and to the spirit and expansiveness of Sri Lankan protesters in 2022, who have renewed my faith in our future, however bleak it seems.