Saroo Brierley And His Long Way Home

The story of Saroo Brierly sounds like a novel. In fact, the Oscar-nominated hit film Lion – The Long Way Home was made from the book published in 2014 . However, the best thing about this story and the movie is that the young man made it through all the madness and confusion of fate to a happy ending.

Saroo’s incredible adventure began in a small Indian town called Khandwa. At that time, little Saroo was only five years old and came from a humble background. His father left the family because of another woman. Mother Fatima had to work as a worker on a construction site. However, she did not earn enough to keep the small family afloat.

There were three children in Saroo’s family. The eldest son Guddu was ten years old when the story began. He supported the mother with temporary work and often swept train wagons. Then there was Saroo, who often accompanied his older brother to work. The youngest child, a girl, was just learning to walk.

The moment that changed Saroo Brierley’s life forever

Every day the two brothers went to earn money and sweep empty trains at the Burhanpur train station. After a long day, little Saroo was so tired that he sat down on one of the benches by the tracks and fell asleep on them. This nap would change his life fundamentally.

When he woke up, he couldn’t make out his older brother anywhere. So he started calling him, but he couldn’t find him anywhere. Saroo saw a train standing in front of the station and thought that his brother Guddu was probably just sweeping the wagons. So he got on the train to look for him. But Guddu was nowhere to be found and did not respond to Saroo’s calls. Then the train set off towards Calcutta and Saroo’s life as he had known it up to now was over in one fell swoop.

In the meantime, the mother waited for her two sons to return, but they never came home. She tried to find out on her own what had happened. After two months, she learned that Guddu had been found dead. Someone had found him on the train tracks. A train had hit him.

Saroo experiences a nightmare in Calcutta

Saroo Brierly arrived in Calcutta after 14 hours on the train. However, he could not speak Bengali and did not know the name of the place from which he came. When he got to the station he wanted to take a train home, but that was impossible. He stayed around the station, slept between cardboard boxes and ate leftovers from rubbish bins.

However, there was a gang there that kidnapped underage street children. The members tried to kidnap little Saroo as well, but he ran away as fast as he could and managed to escape the gang. However, he was afraid to return to the Calcutta train station.

When he thinks about that time in his life, he remembers the hunger and agony he suffered at the time. It is not known exactly how this came about, but a youth took him to a police station. From there he was taken to an orphanage, which had very strict rules.

The orphanage tried to find his family, but it was unsuccessful. After a while, Saroo was accepted into an adoption program. Then he was lucky enough to be adopted by an Australian family who wanted to take care of him – in addition to another Indian boy. Saroo’s life changed radically when he went to Tasmania with his new parents.

Return to his Indian family

Saroo Brierly couldn’t finish with his past. He still remembered his older brother Guddu, his mother and the little sister.

When he was in college , his girlfriend, along with a group of friends, decided to help him find the crucial piece of the puzzle: his hometown in India. They checked all the villages that were 14 hours by train from Calcutta and started searching on Google Earth.

It was another five years before one day Saroo saw a water tower that looked familiar to him. He took a closer look at the surrounding places, and memories suddenly arose in him. Later he recognized a road and a bridge. He said he jumped for joy the moment he recognized his hometown.

Then he traveled to his Indian home village and started looking for it. He followed his gut instinct and found his mother’s house, but no one lived there anymore. Although he had forgotten his mother tongue, he was able to gather some information. Finally one day he arrived at his mother’s doorstep.

She looked at him for a few minutes before she recognized him. Saroo says this reunion with his mother was the happiest moment of his life after a quarter of a century.

Shortly afterwards he learned that his name was not “Saroo” but “Sheru”. As a little boy he didn’t know how to pronounce it correctly and so had come to a new name. “Sheru” means “lion”. A year later he returned to his hometown with his adoptive mother. There he could tie the loose ends back together and enjoy long-awaited hugs.