British ‘Lion’
‘The Oscar-tipped film sparked a search for my Indian roots’
There aren’t many success stories among the street children of Kolkata. Certainly not on the scale of Saroo Brierley, whose book was turned into the film Lion, tipped for Oscar glory this weekend. It’s a story so moving that even hard-bitten hacks at the private screening I went to were suspiciously red-eyed as the credits rolled. It has since captivated audiences worldwide – because it’s all true.
Starring Nicole Kidman and Dev Patel, Lion tells Saroo’s incredible life story. Born into an impoverished family in rural India, his mother laboured in a quarry carrying rocks. They had barely enough to eat and as a small child he used to ride local trains with his older brother, begging for food or a few rupees. One night, just five years old, he got separated and rode on a train to Kolkata, 1,000 kilometres away, landing in the city’s Howrah railway station – the biggest in India and home to hundreds of abandoned children.
He couldn’t speak Bengali and didn’t know his village name, so he faced the perils of life on the street alone, until he was adopted by an Australian family. Fast-forward 25 years and Saroo, now living in Tasmania, uses newly invented Google Earth to search for the village he remembers as a child and eventually is reunited with the family he lost.
For Theresa Godly, 42, an actress from Walton-upon-Thames, this Hollywood film struck a heartbreaking chord. Born on the streets of Kolkata on December 26 1974, Theresa was handed to Shishu Bhavan, the Missionaries of Charity orphanage, a few days later. She still has her adoption papers, signed by Mother Teresa. She knows a little about her Anglo-Indian birth mother, Yvonne, including, she thinks, her late husband’s last name: Fernandez. She had been widowed, she was destitute and living on the streets, she may have been forced to become a prostitute or been raped.
Whatever the reason, she gave up her newborn daughter and Theresa was adopted at eight months by Janey and Stephen Godly, who couldn’t conceive a baby of their own, and brought her up in Streatham, south-east London, as their muchloved only child.
“Janey had Indian heritage, so you would never have guessed I was adopted from looking at the three of us,” says Theresa, “but I grew up knowing that I was special and had been chosen.” Still, she always felt bitter about having been abandoned. “I had a real chip on my shoulder about my birth mother, who I assumed didn’t care about me at all. I had no idea about the situation in India, despite Mum trying to explain it to me.”
It was only when Theresa became a mother at 19, to her daughter Chloe, now 22, and her son Luca, now eight, that she realised giving up your baby would be the most difficult thing for any woman to do. “I started to understand the magnitude of what this woman must have gone through in her heart and mind. If she had been raped, perhaps she couldn’t bear to have a reminder of that; whichever way I think about it, I know she suffered, and that haunts me every single day.”
Theresa saw Lion at the London Film Festival last year, before its release, and it sparked searching questions: “Where is my birth mother? Is she even alive? Is she still living on the streets? Does she ever wonder what happened to me? I thought, if Saroo Brierley managed to find his mother with no real information and little help, then there is hope for me and I must search for her properly. It also made me realise that I can’t be the only person out there looking.”
For street children and those who work with them in Kolkata, Saroo’s story – or at least the early part of it – is, sadly, not remarkable. The Hope Foundation, for whom I have been UK ambassador since 2008, looks after thousands of children living on the streets or in slums, providing education, food and healthcare and trying to protect them from abuse and exploitation.
When I first visited Kolkata’s slums I was overwhelmed, not just by the the noise, the colour, the smell and chaos of poverty, but by the scale. It’s estimated there are around 250,000 children living or working on the streets – the numbers are impossible to comprehend. Like Saroo, there are also tens of thousands of people, worldwide, who were adopted from Indian orphanages, particularly during the Seventies and Eighties. Reliable records are hard to come by, but there are almost certainly thousands in the UK. Since Lion’s release, Theresa has made contact with the Shishu Bhavan volunteer who cared for her before her adoption and discovered that, unusually, her birth mother handed her in to the orphanage herself – and came back to visit her. “As a mother, having felt that love, I couldn’t imagine being parted from my children. Now I know that she didn’t abandon me.”
Even more startlingly, Theresa learnt that her mother brought another child with her when she visited her, meaning she must have a sibling – and in May, Theresa will be making an emotional journey to Kolkata with a documentary team to try to find them. “I’ve accepted that my birth mother may have passed away, but if I can find a brother or sister, I want to help them.”
Even if unsuccessful, she is keen to highlight the plight of the street children in the city of her birth: “These people are my people.”
The Hope Foundation also anticipate that the buzz around Lion will inspire others who were adopted from Kolkata to contact them. One woman who got in touch through Facebook told how she was found in a basket before being adopted by an English couple when she was five, and growing up in Sussex.
“I can’t find people’s families, but perhaps we can help and support each other,” says Theresa. “We are the lucky ones, we were given a better start and a bright future.”
Although it’s estimated there are around 30 million orphans in India today, much tighter restrictions mean that only a few hundred are now officially adopted overseas each year (although illegal child trafficking may account for many more).
The Hope Foundation isn’t involved in adopting children – in fact, it does everything possible to keep children who live in slums with their family, by getting them into schools, paying for uniforms, providing safe places and hot food after school and helping their mothers to find work, so the children don’t have to.
It runs drug rehabilitation clinics for children who use solvents to relieve hunger and their harsh existence, also depicted in Lion. It takes those with nowhere to sleep, or those who are particularly vulnerable, such as the children of prostitutes, into ‘‘protection homes’’ rather than orphanages – the goal being to reunite them with family, even sporadically, if there’s no one who can look after them full-time.
Because as Theresa and Saroo’s stories show, many of India’s street children do have parents, somewhere.
‘I grew up assuming I had been abandoned by my birth mother – now I know I wasn’t’