22 Papers, cards, and perilous encounters with the state in order to consolidate their power, and on the work of Torpey (2000:4) that understands identity card and passport schemes as central to the building and legitimisation of states by establishing a ‘monopoly on the means of movement.’ A body of this literature explores how categorisation and identity card schemes shape and influence national, group, and diasporic identities (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Navaro-Yashin 2007; Hull 2012, 2012; McConnell 2013; Reddy 2015; Williams 2019). Identity card schemes for Rohingya in Myanmar, then, are a useful site through which to explore the state’s role in the slow production of Rohingya statelessness. The central thread in Gulam’s unfolding narrative, as with many of the oral histories I collected, was not simply his personal or family history, but the state’s attempts to both symbolically and physically destroy Rohingya as a group belonging to Rakhine State. It was a story also of his guile and wit in resisting the attempts of the Myanmar State to erase him from the state records and to erase his group identity. It was a story voiced not only for me but also for the young Rohingya refugees nearby, who hung on his words, searching for messages from history to make sense of and try to take control over their own displacement and survival. This was not the first time Gulam’s document had been in Bangladesh. Gulam had been expelled from Myanmar before, in 1978, along with approximately quarter of a million other Rohingya in what was described by the Myanmar military as an ‘immigration operation’ but which quickly turned into a campaign of terror (Linquist 1979). Many Rohingya reported having their identity documents confiscated during this time (UNHRC 1996). In 1978–9, Rohingya in Bangladesh were forcibly repatriated to Myanmar (UNHRC 1994; Crisp 2018). Gulam feared that on return, the Myanmar authorities might seize important documents again. He decided that if he had to return to Myanmar ‘by the legal route,’ which would inevitably involve encounters with state authorities, then the document must stay behind. He hid it with a Bangladeshi family he knew well. He remembered that before he was forced back across the border, an official from an international agency advised all returning Rohingya to keep hold of their ration books. They were told it was an important document as it proved they were returning refugees originally from Myanmar. Sure enough, on Gulam’s route between the transit centre and his home village, he was stopped whilst crossing the fields by a member of the armed forces. He showed the ration book, and it was confiscated, never to be returned. Gulam smiled as he told us this. He knew that he had done the right thing leaving his land document behind. After two weeks, Gulam went back across the border ‘the sneaky way,’ picked up his document, and returned. In the 1990s, following a second round of mass forced repatriations, the National Registration Cards (NRCs) held by his parents and relatives were seized in a household check by the NaSaKa. He rolled up the land document, hid it in an iron pipe, and left it in the house where it stayed hidden in the functional and innocuous object until 2017. When Gulam’s village was attacked by the Myanmar military in 2017, he managed