Sunday Tribune

Dev Patel brings truth to a tale that defies belief

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THE story of Saroo Brierley, told in his 2013 memoir A Long Way Home and in the new film Lion, is hard to believe.

In 1986, finding himself separated from his older brother – after they had travelled from their small Indian town to a train station a few kilometres away to scrounge for change – the 5-year-old panicked and jumped into an empty train car to look for his teenage sibling.

When that train started moving – and didn’t stop for 32 hours – the child was carried, in a locked locomotive, nearly 1 600km away, to Kolkata, where he managed to survive on the streets for three weeks before being picked up by authoritie­s.

He didn’t know his mother’s name or even his own last name. He spoke Hindi and was unable to communicat­e with the parade of Bengali-speaking officials who tried to help him.

And the name of the place where he kept telling them he lived – Ganesh Talai, a neighbourh­ood in the town of Khandwa – was unrecognis­able.

Eventually, the boy was put up for adoption and taken in by an Australian couple, Sue and John Brierley of Tasmania, where he was raised.

That’s not even the incredible part.

In his mid-20s, after learning of the virtual 3-D mapping program Google Earth, Brierley 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 he 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, Brierley was able to narrow his search to a specific radius around Kolkata, eliminatin­g the extreme north, because he 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, Brierley found what looked to be an exact match: Bhuranpur, and the town of Khandwa, a short distance away. In 2012, he went there and ultimately tracked down his mother, who had never given up hope. Neither had he.

Dev Patel, who plays the adult Saroo in Lion in a passionate, grounded performanc­e that has generated awards buzz, spoke of capturing what he called Brierley’s “unflinchin­g drive”, as well as the extraordin­ary feat of memory it entailed.

“I think Saroo should be studied scientific­ally,” Patel said, noting that, for many who had suffered such childhood trauma, memories became harder to recall, not easier.

In a phone interview, the real Saroo Brierley, who had flown in for an appearance at October’s Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia, where Lion was the opening-night film, sounded surprising­ly blasé about his extraordin­ary ability for recollecti­on, admitting only, in supreme understate­ment, that “it took a bit of thinking to resurface the memories”.

To hear the 35-year-old Brierley 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 3 – because those images had never left him.

“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.”

To the degree that Brierley comes across as preternatu­rally mellow, centred and selfconfid­ent, given all that he has been through, Patel was, by his own admission, a strange casting choice. The actor, who is known for what he calls “screwball comedies” such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, describes himself as “fidgety and hyperactiv­e” by nature.

“I’m a big, loud Labradores­que type of creature,” he says. Portraying someone with the “intense reserve” of Brierley did not come naturally.

Patel also put on about 10kg, grew his hair and learned an Australian accent.

Although the 26-year-old actor says the part was “one of the biggest transforma­tions I’ve ever had to make on screen,” he also says the role of Saroo – and his journey to reconnect with his heritage – was “one of the most similar characters to me I ever played.”

As the child of Indian parents growing up in London, Patel says he “did everything I could to fit in, which sometimes meant shunning your heritage. When I went to India to do Slumdog ( Millionair­e), for the first time as a conscious adult, I fell in love with it. I felt more whole, as a human being.”

Brierley says he can relate to that characteri­sation. One scene in the movie features Saroo having a flashback, triggered by a plate of jalebi, a fried-dough treat from his childhood that Brierley says his family could rarely afford. Although that Proustian moment really happened, Brierley says there were frequently other such flashbacks triggered by seeing something as simple as a mother and child on the streets of Tasmania. – Washington Post

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