Christine Dawood still keeps the Lego Titanic her son Suleman spent almost two weeks building in the Surrey home she shares with her 20-year-old daughter. The model is 1.5 metres long and made of 9,090 bricks, and Dawood said people are often surprised to see it in the kitchen where it sits.
“What was I going to do? Break it up? Hide it away? Suleman put all those hours in,” she said. “People are always a bit shocked to see it.” The model has become one of the clearest reminders of the 19-year-old who died on 18 June 2023, when the Titan submersible imploded 500 metres above the wreck of the Titanic, killing him, his 48-year-old father Shahzada Dawood and three other men.
Suleman’s obsession with the Titanic began years earlier, when the family lived in Singapore and he visited a huge exhibition about the liner. “He’d been fascinated with the Titanic since we went to a huge exhibition when we lived in Singapore,” Dawood said. That interest lingered until the summer he boarded Titan for the dive that would cost him his life.
The disaster drew global attention because the submersible vanished during an expedition to the Titanic, and reports at the time said it had about four days of oxygen. Dawood said she was trapped on the ship waiting for signs that Titan would surface, while word spread that she had been meant to go herself but gave her ticket to her son. “The Titanic was claiming another five people, right?” she said. “And the age of my son was a huge thing. If it had been five grown men, it might not have been as juicy.”
That detail has shadowed the story ever since, but Dawood said the family’s grief has never fit the way the disaster was discussed in public. She said she has remained extremely close to her in-laws, and she does not want her daughter defined by the tragedy. “I don’t want her to be known as that girl who lost her father and brother on the Titan,” she said. “She’s just starting her life and I prefer to leave her out.”
Almost three years after the implosion, Dawood has spoken in detail for the first time and written a book about what happened. She said the advice that stayed with her came from a Canadian Coast Guard officer after the search was over: “Hindsight won’t help you, so don’t fall into that trap. Just because you know it now … you didn’t know it before.” For Dawood, the Lego Titanic is not a relic of the disaster so much as the proof that Suleman was still there long after the sea took him.
