Read an exclusive excerpt from The End Doesn’t Happen All At Once- A Pandemic Memoir by Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (Aleph Books, 2025)
PROLOGUE
Surreal. Distorted. Distant, yet too close. Perhaps that is how the Covid pandemic seems to you now.
Because of the letters you are about to read, we remember it differently: crisp and ever present. Because of these letters, we lived it differently: as a challenge to witness it fully, to change ourselves. Because of these letters, we loved each other differently.
We also remember what are now the before-times. We remember the end of the before.
For C, the end started with watching videos taken on cell phones in China, of deserted streets and boarded up doors. Supplies started accumulating in the basement, masks we didn’t yet know how to use. In mid-February, C and the children got very sick. They got better, and then fell sick again. In bed, weakened, C was stricken with fear: the void of tastes and smells seemed to foreshadow the grave. The lost senses returned, but the fear stayed. C tried to tell friends who didn’t know yet. C told them, I think many people will die.
For R, the end came on Monday, March 9, the first day of the university’s spring break. That morning, she walked through the empty halls of the English department with hands and fingers balled in her sleeves, to avoid touching doorknobs, handles, faucet, and wall. She had spoken that morning to her mother, who was in Delhi, and warned her that the world she was scheduled to fly back to on Friday, March 13, was going to be another world entirely.
We were texting frequently.
Almost exactly eleven years prior, at a different university, we had met as newly admitted graduate students on either side of a cheese platter. Late afternoon sun slanted through the big windows of the department library, buzzing with gossip. At the welcome meeting, earlier, C had launched their ideas with panache and the name of a certain German philosopher, R recalls. Her own performance was self-effacing, full of disclaimers, and carefully calibrated. C had noted R’s poise. It made C reach over the hors d’oeuvres and social preliminaries to the real question of the day. ‘So, are you coming too?’ A half-shrug, a warm smile. ‘It’s sort of overdetermined for me.’ C didn’t know exactly what that meant, but they wanted to find out.
We remember eleven years of dinners and initiation rituals, of rifts and reconciliation. We remember two bikes leaned up against the yellow siding of a small apartment under the Berkeley sequoias. We remember what we used to order at the bar and pizza patio joint near campus, because it was always the same: spinach artichoke dip and two glasses of the house red. We remember the night in 2011 that we marched on the ports of Oakland, some weeks after C’s husband Micah floated the original call to Occupy. C was hounded at an assembly by a local reporter with questions about their backstory, their family connections to the US government.
We remember the birth of R’s daughter, Mrinalini, in 2013, and a couple years later, of C’s son, Zia.
We remember saying goodbye together to the campus where we met. The ceremony was tedious; the professor at the podium mispronounced R’s name. We hugged and took giddy pictures on the steps by the side entrance of the department, where C had always locked their bike.
We remember a dream, an intimation slipped into a birthday wish.
It was 2017, and C’s birthday. R remembers writing to C from a window seat on a crowded airplane, with clouds in her peripheral vision. She wrote of gratitude and gifts, but also of the unmistakable violence of the Sonoran desert where she and Brandon, her mathematician husband, had just begun junior faculty jobs. She paused before writing what she most wanted to say:
If I were to suddenly die (I know, I know), would you be willing, one day long in the future and in no hurry, to do something with my unpublished work? I have these half written projects that would need curating, editing. It’s a bit like asking you to be the godmother of my writing. It’s maybe too much. But every time I get on a plane I wonder what would happen to those files and then I think, if I’m lucky enough, maybe C will find them and make them live.
At the window of an urban fourth-floor walk up, C understood the request as a sacred gift. The brief reply held infinite feeling.
Yes, I will care for your writing with all the tenderness I would bring to raising your child, and, instead of praying that you won’t die for many years to come, why don’t we make a different kind of wish—to write something together while we are still alive.
More life would come first. R’s son Shai was born in May 2018, and five months later, C’s daughter Areté. We remember the carefully constructed routines of sleep, feeding, and care, routines that would have been outgrown and forgotten—if not for the rupture of 2020, if not for the division of our lives into after and before.
That Monday in March 2020, R signed on to her office computer to find an email from C. The subject: ‘Info.’
Hi darling, wonderful to hear your voice today. Don’t panic but please do act fast to prepare materially and mentally for a major shift in routine. Talk to the kids. It’s when, not if, and you protect yourselves and others by bowing out early. Take heed of Italy where the death rate is 7 x South Korea because they did not take it seriously. Prisoners escaping there; social unrest will follow. We’ll get through this but it is historic, I think.
Just repeating myself because I love you so much! Showed Zia and Areté old pics of playing with Mrinalini in Ann Arbor over dinner.
Shopping list below; more soon.
Lots of love,
C
The list included foodstuffs and treats for the children, hand sanitizer and Lysol wipes, Mucinex and Zinc. The stores were already out of most of this stuff before the newspapers caught on, before ‘cancel everything’. There was no Lysol in Target that week, no hand sanitizer, no detergent. Only ravaged shelves with displays of glitter pens and commuter mugs, travel pillows, and obsolete tech.
We knew. A lot of us knew. Some of us knew quickly and some of us knew slowly and some of us knew all at once in the toilet paper aisle. Many of us knew for a very long while before we would admit it. Others of us knew right away that we knew, but we did not foresee how we would have to hold that knowing against a tremendous, calculated machinery of forgetting.
That Monday afternoon in March 2020, we spoke by phone. C sat in the small study of their Hudson Valley home, at the desk by the window where so many of the following letters were written. R stood beside her car in the graveled carport shaded from Tucson’s desert sun, and bargained for time.
Can’t I go later, R asked, can’t I do the shopping in a couple of days?
A pause. Go today, C said.
S
Remember?
Excerpted with permission from the authors and publishers of The End Doesn’t Happen All At Once by Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (Aleph Books, 2025).
About the Book
‘Will you write letters with me, back and forth, for the duration of this virus?’
When Covid-19 isolated us all in March 2020, C and R—old friends, parents of young children, academics, and writers—turned to each other.
In 100 intensely vulnerable letters, C and R found their way through family estrangement, tense racial dynamics, gender transitions, chronic pain, dramatic career changes, and activist campaigns. Though both continued to mask and take precautions long after the world returned to ‘normal’, they were often pained by each other’s choices. Nonetheless, they always returned to the page, enacting what R calls durational performance art. The resulting book is a deeply personal, fiercely political roller coaster that plunges from the lockdowns, into social ambivalence, and finally through the long, politically manufactured ‘end’ of the pandemic.
The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once is an unusual kind of Covid book: it recasts the pandemic, in the words of Arundhati Roy, as a possible ‘portal’ into a different world. Conscious of their privileged status as vaccinated Americans, the writers examine global political realities: from Narendra Modi’s announcement of the March 2020 lockdown in India and the ensuing chaos; to the Trumpists’ attack on the US Capitol Building in 2021; from the systemic collapse in India, to the US government’s failures around racism, healthcare, gun violence, abortion laws, and the climate crisis.
These letters serve as both historical document and activist call, and above all, an inspiring testament to the power of friendship to give us the courage to change. Even as it documents some of the world’s darkest times, the book brims with hope for humanity at large.
About the Author
Chi Rainer Bornfree is a writer, philosopher, and activist. With a PhD from U. C. Berkeley, they have taught at Bard, Princeton, and New York state prisons. They are the co-founder of the Activist Graduate School, and the co-creator of ‘AI for the People’, an award-winning, multi-disciplinary vision of an ecological human-AI symbiosis. As assistant editor of The Philosopher magazine, they published a regular column called ‘Liquid Philosophy’ and interviewed prominent public intellectuals. Chi now makes their home in Hudson Valley, New York, where they write, homeschool their kids, grow vegetables, and organize events in their community.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is a scholar of Asian American and South Asian Anglophone literature, postcolonial theory, and feminist cultural studies. She is a co-editor of the René Wellek Prize-winning Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice; a former magazine editor; and a freelance essayist. Her books Overdetermined and What is ‘We’? are forthcoming. Srinivasan currently writes from Texas, where she is the assistant professor of English and Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University.