Little boy lost who took 25 years to find his way back home to mum
Here he tells the incredible story of how he used Google Earth to track down his family 6,000 miles away – as portrayed in an acclaimed film starring Nicole Kidman
WHEN five-year-old Saroo was adopted from a Calcutta orphanage by an Australian couple, his life changed forever. But growing up in Tasmania, he never forgot his first home and decades later began the painstaking search for his mother. His heart-breaking quest inspired the film Lion, starring Nicole Kidman and Dev Patel, which is released here next Friday. Here is Saroo’s story . . .
MY HEART was in my mouth as I approached the place I remembered as my childhood home, a single room in a rundown building in a small and dusty town in central India. The last time I was here I was five years old, a barefoot boy in a grimy pair of black shorts and a white, short-sleeved shirt with several buttons missing.
now I was 30, dressed in Western clothes and looking very out of place. Growing up half a world away, with a new name and a new family, wondering whether I would ever see my loved ones again, I had convinced myself that if I ever found my way back home, they would be here waiting, wondering what became of me.
If so, they would surely be astonished to hear about the events that had separated me from them in the first place, events I ran over endlessly in my mind as I was growing up with John and Sue Brierley, the loving Australian couple who had adopted me in 1987.
I was then six, according to official documents that showed my birthday as May 22, 1981.
But the year had been estimated by the Indian authorities and the date was the day I had arrived at the orphanage in Calcutta from which I had been offered for adoption.
The Brierleys often pointed to that city on the map of India they had pinned to my bedroom wall so that I would feel more at home. But I wasn’t from Calcutta.
A train had taken me there from a station near my home town which I thought was called something like ‘Ginestlay’. I wasn’t sure of the name, but what I did know was that it was a long way from Calcutta and that no one had been able to help me find my home town or my family.
All I had to connect me with them were the memories I brought to mind over and over again, trying to ensure I didn’t forget a thing.
Often I recalled the cramped house in which I was born and which we shared with another family, joining them in the courtyard on long, warm evenings while someone played the harmonium and others sang.
I had a real sense of belonging and well-being on those nights. The women brought out bedding and we huddled together, gazing at the stars, before closing our eyes in sleep.
My mother Fatima Munshi was very beautiful, with long, lustrous hair, but she had made an unwise choice of husband in my father, a building contractor.
When I was around three, and my older brothers Guddu and Kallu were nine and six, he met another woman and abandoned us, leaving my mother to bring us up on our own.
She was pregnant with my sister Shekila and soon after giving birth she had to go out to work on building sites, carrying heavy rocks on her head in the hot sun, six days a week, from morning until dusk.
Eventually she moved us all to the tiny single-room flat to which I would return with such trepidation all those years later.
With a floor made of compacted cowpats and mud, it was probably only about three yards square, so it was fortunate that we were rarely all there at once.
Often my mother sought work in other towns and was away for days at a time. And still she couldn’t earn enough to provide for us so we lived one day at a time, often begging for food from our neighbours.
Harsh as this sounds, we were reasonably happy. I loved the hours I spent watching over Shekila, her grubby face smiling at me as we played peek-a-boo, and I delighted in chasing butterflies or glow-bugs when it got darker.
OFTEn I hung out with my brothers, whom I adored and looked up to. But by the time they were 14 and 11, they were spending very little time at home.
They lived off their wits, scouring the streets for whatever they could find to subsist on and sleeping nights in railway stations, where they sometimes earned food or money for sweeping.
One night, Guddu agreed that I could accompany him to a place that sounded something like ‘Berampur’.
It was about an hour down the line from our local station and it was supposed to be easier to find money and food there. By the time we arrived, I was so exhausted that Guddu told me to have a nap on a platform bench while he scavenged for food. When I woke later, the station was deserted and I couldn’t see him anywhere.
There was a train at the platform where we’d got off so I climbed into an empty carriage, presuming Guddu was further along, searching beneath the seats for whatever he could find.
There was plenty of room to stretch out and in a few moments I was sleeping peacefully again.
WHEn I awoke, the sun was glaring straight into my eyes and I realised with a jolt that the train was rattling along the tracks.
I can still feel the icy chill of panic that hit me when I realised the doors at either end of the carriage were locked. I was trapped, my heart beating triple-time as I ran up and down, yelling out my brother’s name, begging him to come and get me.
After many hours — and what seemed like an eternity to a child of that age — the train slowed until it was hardly moving at all.
Staring wide- eyed from behind the bars of the window, I saw crowds of people.
Suddenly, someone opened one of the doors to my carriage. Without a moment’s thought, I leapt out onto the platform in Calcutta, one of the most intimidating and dangerous cities in the world.
With no money, food or identification of any sort, I had no idea where to go or what to do.
I called out ‘Ginestlay? Berampur?’ hoping someone would tell me how to get back there.
But there were many children begging around the station and I was just one more poor kid crying something out, too small to make anyone stop and listen.
I stayed on the platform even after everyone had left, sleeping on and off and eventually giving up on finding help. One thing I knew was that if a train had brought me to where I was, a train could take me back home again.
Finding the right one was an intimidating prospect. There were very many lines running out of the national hub of Calcutta’s Howrah station, but day after day I caught a different train out of the city.
Shuttling between platforms and travelling new routes, I hoped I’d see something I recognised. Yet without fail, I’d end up in some unfamiliar place, remaining there until the train began the return leg to the sprawling red station that was my starting point.
I don’t know how many weeks or even months I lived on the streets around Howrah station, but somehow I survived, working out which scraps of food tossed on the ground could be safely eaten.
Bits of fried food, such as a samosa, were pretty safe once you scraped off the dirt, but they were highly prized and sometimes I found myself shoved aside or punched by other children. We were like wild dogs fighting over a bone.
One day I was befriended by a railway worker who offered me shelter in the shack he shared with his workmates.
He told me he knew someone who could help me, but I knew something wasn’t right when my ‘saviour’, a man in a neat suit, turned up and invited me to lie on the bed next to him.
I bolted, chased by the railwayman and his friends, and only escaped by hiding in a leaking sewerage pipe, ignoring the cobwebs and the foul- smelling water running over my hands.
That terrifying experience reinforced my suspicion of other people, but fortunately I let my guard down when I was approached by a teenager about the age of my brother Guddu.
I have no idea what made him take an interest in me, but after I had told him my story he took me to the local police station and from there I was sent to an orphanage run by the wonderful Mrs Sood.
After I had spent a few weeks there, she explained no one had been able to find ‘Ginestlay’ or ‘Berampur’, but I was being offered a new home with a family who lived in another country — Australia.
A part of me had already accepted I would never see my family again and what choice did I have? Keep searching for a train to a place not even the adults could find?
I told Mrs Sood I wanted to go and soon found myself embarking on a startlingly different life with the Brierleys in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania.
It took me a while to adjust to what seemed to be a city of gleaming palaces, including their home. There were four bedrooms for only three people, a kitchen full of food and a fridge I loved standing in front of, just to feel the cold air come out when it opened.
It all seemed amazingly exotic, but by the time I began high school, the map of India on my bedroom wall was overshadowed by posters of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and my other favourite groups.
I ended up working with Mum and Dad in their business, selling industrial hoses. But I never stopped thinking about my Indian family.
Sometimes I would lie in bed, trying to send my mother telepathic messages to let her know I was alive and well. Or I’d visualise myself walking through the streets of my home town, opening my family’s front door and watching over my mother and Shekila as they slept. For many years, it seemed these trips would remain imaginary. My searches on the early versions of the internet failed to turn up anything resembling ‘Ginestlay’ or ‘Berampur’. But then along came Google Earth.
As anyone who has used this free computer software knows, its satellite imaging means you can sweep across the world like an astronaut and zoom down on spots you are interested in, rendering them in astonishing detail.
Logic dictated that if I followed all the train lines out of Kolkata, as Calcutta was now known, I would eventually find my starting point.
night after night, I was on the laptop, staring at railway lines and zeroing in to places I might recognise in my five-year-old mind.
It was a repetitive, forensic exercise and my girlfriend Lisa sometimes looked at me as if I might be crazy.
I began to wonder that myself, but then, one night in March 2011, I spotted a station with a water tower like one I remembered seeing near ‘Berampur’. There was
also a horseshoe shaped road that looked familiar.
When I clicked on the blue symbol that revealed the town’s name as Burhanpur, my heart nearly stopped. From there, I dragged the cursor miles along the train line until I saw a town called Khandwa, which had a bridge over a big river, just like the one I had played in as a child.
Almost frozen with excitement, I followed a route with the cursor that I had gone over and over in my head since I was a little boy so that I would never forget it.
Sure enough, it took me along a maze of streets and alleys to a neighbourhood called Ganesh Talai — as close to my childhood mispronunciation of ‘Ginestlay’ as you could hope for.
Was this where my Indian family were still living? There was only one way to be sure, but it was weeks before I found the courage to raise with Mum and Dad the question of going to India.
Even then I edged round to it — I asked them what they would do in my situation. They said it was obvious: I had to go. Who wouldn’t want to visit to make sure?
Lisa felt the same way and so I embarked on the long journey back to the house I’d last seen as a child. When I got there, it looked so tiny, but it was unmistakable.
But it was abandoned, the floor my mother had swept clean was dusty from disuse. Hollowed out with disappointment, I had no idea what to do next.
But my appearance marked me out as a foreigner in these streets so far from the tourist trail and a man asked in English if he could help.
This was the first person I’d been able to talk to since I arrived in India and my story tumbled out as I showed him photos of me as a child.
He looked surprised, but then led me down an adjacent alley. After only about 15 yards, he stopped in front of three women standing at a doorway, all looking at me.
‘This is your mother,’ he said and I realised there was something familiar about the one in the middle.
She was slender and seemed so small, with greying hair pulled back in a bun, and wearing a bright yellow floral dress.
Despite the years, I knew the fine bone structure of her face the instant I looked at her. In that moment she seemed to know me, too.
She stepped forward, took my hands and held them, and stared into my face with wonderment. I was thinking clearly enough to understand that whatever turmoil I was feeling, at least I’d had some chance to prepare. For my mother, 25 years after losing him, her son had simply reappeared.
Later, she 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’. I had thunder in my head, too. As she took me to her house, a crumbling brick dwelling just around the corner, people came flocking to see me.
There was shouting and laughing, but eventually two special guests were ushered inside: my brother, Kallu, and sister, Shekila.
Neither had any cause to learn English, so this was a reunion of tears, smiles and speechless wonder, before some simple communication via well-wishers who could translate.
It was bittersweet to be so close to my family and yet still cut off in this fundamental way.
BuT where was Guddu? Of all the stories I wanted to hear, his was top of the list. That’s when I was told the hardest news I’ve ever heard.
Guddu hadn’t come home after that night I disappeared. My mother found out a few weeks later that he had fallen from a moving train and died. She’d lost two sons at once.
I couldn’t imagine how she had borne it, but, as I was to learn, she had never given up on the idea that I might come back.
Just as my search for her had shaped my life, so her faith that I was alive had shaped hers.
Though she could have gone to Burhanpur to live with Kallu and his wife, she had wanted to stay near the house she had been living in when I disappeared so I could find her if ever I came back.
When it was time for me to return to Australia — a time that came around far too quickly — I felt the wrench of leaving deeply.
But one thing was obvious, the trip between India and Australia — between my homes — was one I was destined to make many times, not least to make my mother’s life more comfortable as best I could.
Too old to carry stones on her head any more, she worked as a cleaner. Despite the hardness of her life, she told me she was happy.
Nevertheless, my first step — as a successful businessman — is to relieve her of the burden of renting a place to live. I look forward to seeing her settled in a home she can call her own.
My desires for myself are less clear. I was never searching in the hope of somehow getting back to the life I had missed.
I am not Indian. I have spent almost all of my life in Australia and I have bonds there that cannot be challenged or broken.
But I am not conflicted about who I am or where to call home. I have two families, not two identities. I know who I am: I am Saroo Brierley.