He was better dressed than when he’d left – a black suit, white shirt, tie and shoes replacing the casual attire he’d worn when family and friends saw him off.
But he had to be buried in line with his Muslim beliefs, so his body would need to be prepared; the neat clothes removed.
It was then Imran Mohammad, 41, saw the extent of what had happened to his 31-year-old brother while fighting for the Russian armed forces in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I saw holes on the back of his shoulder, his ribs right down till his lower back,” Imran told CNN.
“There were six to seven holes caused by a drone attack. It ripped through his body. There was internal damage. Two teeth were broken.”
And now this tight-knit family in Hyderabad, southern India was broken too. A husband, father and provider gone.
Imran’s business was also in ruins, rotted by neglect as he’d focused all his energies on finding out what happened to his brother on the battlefield of Europe’s bloodiest conflict since the Second World War.
Imran noted the time.
“I opened the box at 11 a.m. Sunday. When I saw his body for the first time, it hit me that he’s no more,” he said.
“My efforts to look for my brother, my two-month fight for my brother, came to a painful end. I wanted to react looking at his corpse, but I just couldn’t. I went totally numb.”
A dream lost
Asfan met an unlikely fate – one his family could never have imagined when Putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022.
At the time, the father of two managed a clothing store, one of almost 300 across India in the homegrown Allen Solly chain, selling kids’ clothes, wedding tuxedos and just about everything in between.
He’d been there eight years, his brother said.
It wasn’t the worst job, but Asfan wanted more for his wife and two children, ages 2 and 8 months. And he dreamed of taking them out of Hyderabad.
“He wanted to work in Australia,” where his sister-in-law and her family lived, Imran said. “They were calling him and his family there.”
But that meant Asfan would need a high score on the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), which gauges proficiency of non-native speakers.
“He wrote his IELTS. He didn’t do well,” Imran said. “He felt demotivated. He tried again.”
It didn’t work, Imran said.
