For more than three months, Eshan Dias has spent every night living in a makeshift tarpaulin tent in the centre of Colombo, Sri Lanka’s commercial capital. Through boiling heat, monsoon rains and shortages of food and water, he and hundreds of others refused to move from this site on Galle Face Green, which became the defiant heart of the anti-government movement demanding the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
Late on Thursday night, a crowd came roaring into his tent. They had succeeded; Rajapaksa, who had already fled the country in the dead of night on Wednesday, was stepping down. By Friday morning he was officially president no more.
