The malicious borders bill criminalises asylum seekers and anyone who helps them Gulwali Passarlay carries the Olympic flame between Burnley and Rawtenstall, June 2012. Photograph: Joe Giddens/LOCOG/Press Association Images Gulwali Passarlay carries the Olympic flame between Burnley and Rawtenstall, June 2012. Photograph: Joe Giddens/LOCOG/Press Association Images Sun 11 Jul 2021 02.30 EDT Last modified on Sun 11 Jul 2021 04.43 EDT ‘Before I died I contemplated how drowning would feel.” So opens Gulwali Passarlay’s 2015 book The Lightless Sky. Passarlay was, in 2006, a 12-year-old boy in a rural village in Afghanistan, caught in the crossfire between Taliban and American forces. After his father was shot dead by US soldiers, his mother paid a smuggler to take Gulwali and his brother, Hazrat, to safety in Europe. It’s the beginning of a gruelling 12,000-mile trek that takes Passarlay from imprisonment in Iran to being thrown off a moving train in Bulgaria and to seeming death on an overcrowded boat from Turkey to Greece. He survives and makes his way across Europe to the “Jungle” migrant camp in Calais, before smuggling himself into Britain in a refrigerated lorry carrying bananas.