As a five-year-old Indian boy, he got lost at a railway station. Twenty-five years later, starting out half a world away in Australia, Saroo Brierley found his way back. By Ankita Jain
The train started moving— and didn’t stop for 32 hours— a child was carried, in a locked locomotive, nearly 1,000 miles away, to Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), where he managed to survive on the streets for three weeks before being picked up by the authorities. The story of Saroo Brierley in his 2013 memoir A long Way Home and in the Oscar nominated film lion, is hard to believe. In 1986, finding himself separated from his older brother — after they had travelled from their small town of Khandwa to a train station several miles away to scrounge for change — the five-year-old panicked, jumping into an empty train car to look for his teenage sibling and way to home.
Home for Saroo was a tiny mud-brick house with a tin roof. He lived there with his mother, Kamala, who worked long hours carrying bricks and cement, two older brothers, Guddu and Kullu, and a younger sister, Shekila. His father, Munshi, had abandoned the family two years earlier. Guddu, then aged nine, had assumed his role as the man of the house. Along with Guddu, Saroo spent his days searching passenger trains for fallen coins. And it was one of those days, he got separated from his family. After spending several weeks on the streets, he was sent to a government juvenile detention centre, and later an adoption organisation. They tried to trace his family but Saroo could not remember enough details about where he was from, for his family to be traced, and so it was arranged for him to be adopted by a couple in Australia. “I didn’t know my mother’s given name or even my own last name. I spoke Hindi then and was unable to communicate with the parade of Bengali-speaking officials who tried to help me. And the name of the place where I kept telling them I lived— Ganesh Talai (a neighborhood in the town of Khandwa)— was unrecognisable. Eventually, I was put up for adoption and taken in by an Australian couple, Sue and John Brierley of Tasmania, where I was raised,” says Saroo.
He sounded surprisingly blasé about his extraordinary ability for recollection, that “it took a bit of thinking to resurface the memories.” To hear the 35-year-old Saroo tell the story, it wasn’t all that difficult to dredge up images of where he came from— his earliest memories, he says, date to when he was three-years-old— because those images had never left him.
Though he was quite happy with his foster parents, he always had a hazy picture of where he belonged. “I had been saying to myself, since childhood, I will never forget the place where I was born,” he says. “That’s my identity. If I lose that, I lose everything.”
Sure, he acknowledges, over time some details had gotten lost in the mist of memory. But what he calls “the crux of the place”— vivid details of architecture and landscape— stayed with him.
Growing up in Tasmania, Saroo had a map of India on his wall. “The map’s hundreds of place names swam before me in my childhood,” he recalls. “long before I could read them, I knew that the immense V of India was teeming with cities and towns, with deserts and mountains, rivers and forests— the Ganges, the Himalayas, tigers, gods— and it came to fascinate me. I would stare up at the map, lost in the thought that somewhere among all those names was the place I had come from.”
In his mid-20s, after learning of the virtual 3-D mapping programme Google Earth, Saroo began searching online for images that might correspond with his fragmentary memories of the town where he last saw his brother: a water tower near a highway overpass, visible from the station platform; a nearby ravine; and a place name that began with the letter “B.”
“Guessing that I could have been on the train for as long as 24 hours, and multiplying that number by the speed of Indian passenger trains in the 1980s, I was able to narrow my search to a specific radius around Kolkata, eliminating the extreme north of the country because I had never seen snow as a child and the extreme south, where Hindi is not widely spoken. After several years of painstaking searching, rail line by rail line, I found what looked to be an exact match: Bhuranpur, and the town of Khandwa, a short distance away,” he explains. He believes the development in technology is helping millions of people like him in one way or the other. “If the mapping programme wasn’t launched, I would have never met my mother in India.”
In 2012, Saroo travelled, ultimately tracking down his mother, who had never given up hope. “I travelled, alone again, back to Khandwa and retraced the route I used to walk from the train station to my home. When I arrived there I found that the shack, shared by a family of five, was empty and crumbling. I showed my picture, like the one featured here of me as a young boy, to people passing and eventually somebody said: come with me, I’m going to take you to your mother.”
Twenty-five years after he had disappeared, Saroo was reunited with his biological mother. Although his family had moved away, his mother had always wanted to stay close to her old home in case one day her son would return. “My mother described her reactions better than I ever could mine: she said she was ‘surprised with thunder’ that her boy had come back, and that the happiness in her heart was as deep as the sea.” He adds, “Though I am not familiar with Hindi anymore, the conversation happened with the help of translator.”
“The ultimate driving force was knowing if my family was alive,” he says. “Seeing their faces again and telling them I’m okay and knowing that they’re okay as well. Who else wouldn’t want that tooIJ It was about having closure, and there is closure now,” he adds. So did his reunion with his biological mother change his equations with his foster parentsIJ “My biological mother understands that I am more comfortable in Australia and she is more than happy that I am alive and fine.”
Following the incredible reunion with his family, Saroo’s story became a media sensation. He wrote a book, which has become the source of the Oscar-nominated film lion, starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman.
About the film, he says it adheres quite strictly to real life events. “There are scenes in there that are just the way that were in reality. I thought I’d be quite defensive about the film, because naturally you’d think you’re the one who lived through all the trials and tribulations. But it wasn’t like that at all, it brought back memories. It was physically and emotionally gripping right from the start. I cried several times watching the film.”
Saroo is now 35, though nobody knows his real date of birth. “I don’t have a birth certificate,” he says. “The 22nd of May was when I was found in India, and they thought they would give me that day and month. As for the year, they thought I was roughly born around 1981 but I always say I’m younger. My biological mother suspected it was around June, July or August, so I guess maybe it wasn’t too far off, but you’re testing a 63-year-old traumatised woman’s memory,” he chuckles. The film lion is set to release in India on February 24.
Photo: Pankaj Kumar