Dr. Lemma@DoctorLemma
In 1986, a five-year-old boy in India fell asleep on a bench at a train station while waiting for his older brother to come back. His brother never returned.
The boy wandered onto an empty train carriage, thinking his brother might be inside. He fell asleep again. When he woke up, the doors were locked and the train was moving. It didn’t stop for nearly two days. When it finally did, he was in Kolkata, nearly 1,500 kilometres from home. He was too young to know his surname, couldn’t read, and had no idea what his hometown was called.
He survived alone on the streets for weeks, sleeping under station benches and scavenging scraps of food, before eventually being taken to an orphanage and declared a lost child. No one could trace where he came from.
He was adopted by a couple from Tasmania, Australia, who gave him a loving home and a new life. His name became Saroo Brierley. He grew up on the other side of the world.
But he never forgot. He held onto fragments: the image of a bridge near a train station, a water tower, a neighbourhood layout, the faces of his family.
In his mid-twenties, he discovered Google Earth. He calculated the rough distance the train could have covered based on how long he remembered being on it, drew a circle on a map around Kolkata, and began searching along every railway line within that radius. Some weeks he spent 30 hours scanning satellite images of towns across central India, looking for landmarks that matched his childhood memories. His family in Australia didn’t even know. They thought he was just browsing the internet.
In 2011, after years of searching, he found it. A water tower. A bridge. A ravine past a station. It was a neighbourhood called Ganesh Talai in the city of Khandwa. He zoomed in and recognised the streets he had walked as a small boy.
He flew to India and walked through the town until he found his family’s home. The door was chained shut and he feared the worst. Then people came out. One of them led him to a woman down the road.
It was his mother. She had never stopped looking for him. After 25 years, they were standing in front of each other.
What he didn’t know until that moment was that his brother Guddu, the one he’d been waiting for at the station that night, had been struck and killed by a train. His mother had spent 25 years searching for both sons. She learned what happened to one. She never stopped praying for the other.
His story became the book “A Long Way Home” and was adapted into the film “Lion,” which received six Academy Award nominations.
