Three brothers, two deaths, 39 days

Abdul Halimi rematerialised in a phone call. At least, that’s how his brother Doulat remembers it. Abdul had been little more than a toddler the last time he saw him. He thought he might have died, or at the very least he’d disappeared from view, one of a million pieces of his life Doulat was forced to leave behind when he fled Afghanistan for London in 2000.

But in 2014, his phone buzzed with a call from an Iranian number. The voice on the other end of the line was a distant family friend — someone from the same village as his parents — and with him was a 14-year-old Abdul. Abdul, like his brother, had fled Afghanistan and was now in Iran, trying to find his way to London. It would be months of cross-continental treks and asylum applications before Doulat could go to Cambridge to pick up the little brother he’d never had the chance to get to know and bring him back home to east London. His arrival, along with that of Doulat’s older brother Mardan years earlier, was a second chance at a relationship. For the first time, something resembling a family — a future — was taking shape on the streets of Stratford. 

Over a few short weeks last year, both of Doulat’s brothers would be dead. The story of the 39 days that destroyed his family is one of broken systems, wrongful imprisonments and inescapable trauma. It’s a saga that exposes the indignities faced by refugees trying to build a life in the capital, and the all-too human tragedies that play out every day for the most ostracised in this city.