Kamla, Saroo’s mother, worked 6 days a week, morning until nightfall, hard physically grueling work, sometimes gone for days at a time. Broken, unpaved streets outside throughout the poverty-stricken neighborhood.
When Saroo’s father left his mother and their family for another woman, another family, they moved from the Hindu community / side of town to the Muslim side moving into a single room falling apart with a cowpat and mud floor and a small corner fireplace. It offers more information about both his birth and adoptive families, and on the page, is even more awe-inspiring and courageous.Sad, horrifying, wondrous, life affirming, heartbreaking and heartwarming. It is reported that 80,000 children go missing in India each year, and despite the pitiless indifference and some sinister near-misses he encountered on the streets, Saroo has been left with a sincere belief in the goodness of people, and the importance of seizing opportunities.Ī Long Way Home is as broadly appealing and crowd-pleasing as Lion – the new Oscar-nominated adaptation starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman. Against all odds, he’s eventually reunited with his long-lost family after tracing his hometown on Google Earth – a feat that made global headlines. Yet he never forgets India or fully moves on. When attempts to establish his identity fail, he passes through a frightening juvenile home into the care of a adoption agency, ISSA, before being flown to his adoptive parents in Tasmania – Sue and John Brierley.įrom the impoverished child with broken teeth and a heart murmour, Saroo grows into a healthy and amiable adult, a “proud Tassie”. He spends three weeks on the streets until a stranger takes him to a police station. (It later turns out he was mispronouncing even his first name – his name is actually Sheru, or ‘Lion’ in Hindi.) Saroo speaks Hindi, and is unable to pronounce the name of his town or his last name. Saroo stumbles onto a waiting train and goes back to sleep.Ĭhildhood memory can be unreliable, but suffice to say Saroo finds himself alone and trapped on a moving train, carrying him 1,500km east (he will later learn) to the megacity of Kolkata. When he wakes up, it is dark, and Guddu has vanished. One time with his eldest brother Guddu, an exhausted Saroo is left to nod off on a bench on a railway platform. The little boy loves flying kites, chasing butterflies and tagging behind his brothers as they hustle for food and money. Saroo’s mother is warm and kindhearted, and neighbours in the dry, dusty central Indian town seem to watch out for each other. Despite this hardship, Saroo is lucky – his family are poor, but they are, Saroo will recall, “reasonably happy”.
With no father at home, their mother works on construction sites, carrying rocks on her head in the baking heat. Saroo’s streetwise big brothers, Guddu and Kallu, take care of each other and little Saroo. He washes and feeds her, and plays games of peekaboo. In 1980s India, five-year-old Saroo, like many small children in poor communities, looks after a younger sibling he has special responsibility for his baby sister Shekila.
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