The real story behind the movie “Lion — A Journey Home”

Upon reaching adulthood, many people leave the home in which they were born, stronghold of their first memories, with the aim of continuing to develop far from their homeland. As we grow, life sets us goals and challenges that enrich us with learning and lead us to maturity. However, as we move forward, we also run the risk that life’s adversities and distractions make us forget who we really are and how we got to the place where we are, making us lose our way on the path we were on.

O awesome.club presents the story of Saroo Brierley, who, at age 5, got lost and for a long time could not find his family. After years of searching, overcoming his limitations and internal conflicts, he not only managed to find his home of origin, but himself, and ended up inspiring the film. Lion — A Journey Home.

Saroo Brierley is a leading Australian businessman and writer who has published an autobiographical book entitled A long journey home. However, although his current economic situation gives him some comforts, and his success is publicly recognized, the truth is that Saroo was not born in Australia, much less in wealth, but in very humble conditions.

Saroo was born in 1981 in India and his real name is Sheru Munshi Khan. The boy lived his first five years in a poor family, under very precarious conditions. After his father abandoned the family, his mother had to start working on a construction site in order to support the children. The problem is that the salary was not enough to have food every day, so Saroo and two of his older brothers, Guddu and Kallu, tried to get money and food through small jobs or begging. Despite all the hardships, the truth is that the union between mother and children was very strong, and they learned to be happy without great material resources, supporting each other and enjoying the simple things in life.

One night Guddu went to work cleaning a train station, a job he used to do from time to time, and after Saroo’s insistence that he let him go along, his brother grudgingly agreed. However, when they arrived, and because it was very late, Saroo stayed asleep on a bench on the platform, and Guddu went to work telling his brother that he would be back soon and not to leave. But he didn’t come back, so Saroo, impatient, looked for him in the car of an empty train, stopped at the station: “I thought my brother would come back and wake me up, but when I woke up, I didn’t see him anywhere. I saw a train and thought he might be on it. So I decided to look for him in the wagons, thinking I would find him.” Overcome by sleep, he ended up falling asleep and, when he woke up, the train was in motion, making it impossible for him to get off. “I still feel the shiver of panic at seeing me trapped. I kept running and screaming my brother’s name, begging him to come back and get me,” recalled Saroo.

He couldn’t get off the train until he reached Howrah station, a neighborhood in Calcutta where they spoke a completely different language and where he didn’t know anyone. “I was afraid. He didn’t know where he was. I just started approaching people and asking them questions,” Saroo said. But no one could help him, so he spent two or three weeks living there, sleeping on the benches at the station, eating scraps and running away from people who could harm him. Until, finally, a teenager took him to a police station where he was declared a lost child. Unfortunately, Saroo didn’t have the knowledge to tell the professionals what his hometown was, a name he mispronounced. He spoke ganestalaybut the correct one was Ganesh Talaiso, without being able to contact his family, the authorities sent him to an orphanage.

Saroo didn’t stay long at the orphanage. One day, Sue and John Brierley, who wanted to adopt a child, waited for him at an airport with a stuffed koala and chocolates to invite him to be a part of their family. The affection was immediate and, without a doubt, they took him to live with them in Tasmania. “I accepted that I was lost and that I couldn’t find my way back home, so I thought it would be amazing to live in Australia,” thought Saroo, who immediately felt an affinity for Sue. She said, very emotional, that “the arrival of Saroo was a kind of birth in her family” and that when she met him “it was a fantastic moment, full of love and joy”. Even without knowing his origins, the couple realized that “the boy came from a good family, who had lived with love around him”, said John.

Quickly, Saroo learned English and forgot his native language (that’s why the name Saroo turned out to be a bad pronunciation of Sheru), and his family adopted another boy named Mantosh. Years passed and he grew up in a loving environment, with parents willing to educate him and do everything in their power to make him as happy as he made them. That’s how it all happened, but the story of Saroo’s childhood, for the boy, was unfinished: “Without a doubt, it was traumatic to have all the memories and the feeling of uncertainty, but I learned to deal with it”, he recalled. “Ever since I was a child, when I went to bed, I had a lot of dreams about my family in India.” Looking at the situation now, “for a long time, my childhood was a burden, which actually kept these thoughts and memories alive.”

Successful in his studies in hotel management, as he grew up, Saroo became a model of a good son and a person loved by all, due to his strong personality. His future was promising and that humble and hungry boy didn’t even have the language left. However, for him, his past was not suppressed, since he had a family that he never said goodbye to and that, certainly, felt worried because he didn’t know what had happened to his son. The young man needed to find his biological family so his mother and siblings would know he was okay. However, how could he find them if he couldn’t even remember the name of his hometown?

Far from his place of origin, as he went up in life, this restlessness became more intense, to the point of having an impact on his happiness and leading him to a great feeling of emptiness. So he decided to put an end to the uncertainty by doing what he couldn’t as a child: finding his way back home.

Fortunately, he made friends from India at university, who taught him how to use Google Earth, a platform that displays maps of the world with satellite imagery. Using the Howrah train station as a point of reference (where he lived for several weeks in his childhood, after getting off the train), he gradually analyzed every place in India that looked like his own land. “I used math and everything I could remember about the landmarks and architecture of my hometown,” he recounted of his odyssey.

After five years of research and a lot of determination, in 2011 his effort paid off when he found a river in satellite images that looked familiar to him: “when I found it, I zoomed in and simply recognized it. I went through the image and found even the waterfall where I used to play”, and he was so happy when he saw that place that he had not seen for over twenty years, he even thought he was dreaming: “was it true? Was it dream? (…) It was a surreal moment. She was jumping for joy inside.”

In February 2012, with the support of his adoptive family, Saroo traveled to India, to the place indicated by the map. “If he wanted to explore the region, that was fine with us. What we wanted is for him to feel completely happy with his identity,” Sue explained. Without remembering the language, but with determination, the boy traveled alone and, when he arrived, he walked the path he used to do when he was a child. Each place brought back childhood memories that guided him to the humble home he had lived in. However, it was not all joy, as when he arrived he found that no one was there. “When I arrived, the door was locked. The house was old and battered, as if it hadn’t been occupied by anyone for a long time,” said Saroo, who, at that moment, feared that he had traveled in vain. However, his presence caught the attention of the curious neighbors, who approached him to ask if he needed anything: “another person came, then a third, and then one of them said: ‘wait a minute and I’ll be right back’. Upon returning, after a few minutes, she said: ‘Now I’m going to take you to your mother’”.

“I just got numb and thought, ‘Am I really hearing this?’” Despite the emotion, when they took him, at first he could not recognize his mother, since his memory was totally different from the woman in front of him, now much older: “but the facial structure was still there, so much so that I recognized her and I told him: ‘yes, it’s my mother’”. Then they hugged each other tightly. “It was the most crucial moment of my life”, said Saroo, who, unable to speak the same language, tried to tell him: “I know you looked for me, I also spent my whole life trying to find you”. It was then that his mother, without saying a single word, took him by the hand and led him to her house. “He couldn’t tell me anything. I think she was as anesthetized as I was. She had some trouble understanding that her son, 25 years later, had reappeared like a ghost.”

When they found a way to communicate, Saroo learned that the night he slept in the wagon, his brother had an accident and almost lost his life, so he didn’t come back to get him. Then he understood how difficult it was for his family to find him, with virtually no information about the time of his disappearance. However, “my mother never stopped praying for my return. She reached out to various priests and spiritual guides in the community for help and guidance. Everyone assured her that I was safe and sound, and that she was happy. The most amazing thing is that when she asked them where I was, they pointed south. I began to understand that my mother’s faith in my survival had marked her life, just as my determination to find her had marked mine.” Although she was sometimes treated as demented, she never gave up hope that her son was still alive and that they would meet again.

A year later, the adoptive mother also wanted to meet the biological one and went to India to see her….