‘Lion’ roars his true tale

SAROO Brierley just left my house. Saroo Brierly — perfect white shirt, spit-shined black shoes, crisp blue suit, freshly arrived from India, no night’s sleep — sat eating my tuna fish sandwich.

So who’s Saroo Brierley? The Indian kid who sounds Australian and why “Lion” might win Best Picture and why Ni

cole Kidman and Dev Patel may also grab Oscars.

Saroo: “Taken from your family at 3 or 4 or 5 is scary. I learned to survive. It was instinctual. Living on raw nerves. I ate from the ground. From an open can of peas.”

Said adoptive mother Sue Brierley, who was with him: “When we first met, we couldn’t even converse. He came from the streets. He didn’t speak English. We could only look at each other.”

This film about Saroo’s lost childhood — a tiny human being from the slums of India, inadvertently left asleep as his train crossed the entire world and, alone, terrified, lost, not speaking the language of the foreign country’s destination, not knowing where he was, survived. How did this story come about?

“When, 20 years later, I first became reunited with my birth mother, India’s local media went crazy. TV, newspapers, magazines followed me back to Australia. I was asked to write a book. I did, and then came the movie, which left out many things because there’s just so much you can put into two hours.

“I have no reason to worry about myself anymore. I’m OK. If I earn anything from this film as it plays around the world, what I want is to take that money and pay back the orphanage that had taken me in.”

Next week, when I have more space, I’ll tell much more of his story.