It is 10am and the queue outside a petrol station in one suburb of Sri Lanka’s commercial capital Colombo is already hundreds of people long. At the front is Malar Peter, whose family has taken turns to keep their place for 12 hours already. A few paces behind her is Padmasiri, who arrived at 1am. And right at the back of the queue stands Arumugam Annaletchumi, 50, who expects to be there for the rest of this hot, humid day.

They are all waiting for kerosene, carrying empty plastic canisters for a few litres with which to cook and burn lamps during the long blackouts caused by power shortages. Yet they are there in hope as much as anything else. There is no kerosene at the station and it’s unclear if it will arrive. For Sri Lankans, who until recently enjoyed some of the highest living standards in South Asia, such queues were rare until a few months ago. “People just want to live without problems like this,” Annaletchumi says. “This country has been robbed.”

Sri Lanka this month defaulted on its overseas loans after missing interest payments on two $1.25bn sovereign bonds, the first country in the Asia-Pacific to do so in more than two decades, according to Moody’s data. The latest estimates put the country’s total foreign debt at more than $50bn, with a $1bn bond maturing in July. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government says it has all but run out of foreign reserves and fuel, relying on ad hoc shipments to top-up supplies in the most visible manifestation of a crisis that, the Eurasia Group consultancy warns, is turning the island into a “failed” state.