![]() ![]() Was there a little girl who could now be this woman? I try to remember who lived next door to us when this was my home. Again I point to myself, and then say ‘little’ as I point to the boy in the photographs. I scrabble around in my daypack and pull out an A4 page with colour photographs of me as a child. ![]() Then I remember something Mum gave me back in Australia, for just this situation. I say, ‘I don’t speak Hindi, I speak English,’ and I’m astonished when she responds, ‘I speak English, a little.’ I point at the abandoned room and recite the names of the people who used to live there – ‘Kamla, Guddu, Kallu, Shekila’ – and then I point to myself and say, ‘Saroo.’ I remember barely any Hindi and I’m not confident about how to pronounce the little I do know. To make matters worse, I can’t speak her language, so when she speaks to me, I can only guess that she’s asking me what I want here. I look Indian, but my Western clothes are probably a little too new, my hair carefully styled – I’m obviously an outsider, a foreigner. A young woman in red robes comes out of the better maintained flat next door, holding a baby in her arms. This time I’m thirty, I’ve got money in my pocket and a ticket home, but I feel just like I did on that railway platform all those years ago – it’s hard to breathe, my mind is racing and I wish I could change the past. Not for the first time in my life, I’m lost and I don’t know what to do. This was my worst fear, so paralysing that I suppressed it almost completely – that once I finally found my home, after years of searching, my family wouldn’t be in it. Through the window, as well as some gaps in the familiar crumbling brick wall, I can see into the tiny room my family shared, the ceiling only a little higher than my head. The door, its hinges broken, is so much smaller than I remember it as a child – now I would have to bend over to fit through it. The last time I stood here I was five years old. And now here I am, standing at a door near the corner of a run-down building in a poor district of a small, dusty town in central India – the place I grew up – and no-one lives there. Growing up half a world away, with a new name and a new family, wondering whether I would ever see my mother and brothers and sister again. Saroo's return journey will leave you weeping with joy and the strength of the human spirit' Manly Daily (Australia) 'We urge you to step behind the headlines and have a read of this absorbing account.With clear recollections and good old-fashioned storytelling, Saroo.I’ve been thinking about this day for twenty-five years. 'Amazing stuff' The New York Post 'So incredible that sometimes it reads like a work of fiction' Winnipeg Free Press (Canada) 'A remarkable story' Sydney Morning Herald Review 'I literally could not put this book down. Lion is a triumphant true story of survival against all odds and a shining example of the extraordinary feats we can achieve when hope endures. And how, at thirty years old, with some dogged determination, a heap of good luck and the power of Google Earth, he found his way back home. How he then ended up in Tasmania, living the life of an upper-middle-class Aussie. How he ended up on the streets of Calcutta. This is the story of what happened to Saroo in those twenty-five years. until the day he boarded a train alone and got lost. ![]() Five-year-old Saroo lived in a poor village in India, in a one-room hut with his mother and three siblings. Twenty-five years later, I crossed the world to find my way back home. As a five-year old in India, I got lost on a train. This is the heart breaking and original tale of the lost little boy who found his way home twenty-five years later. Discover the inspiring, true story behind the film, Lion. Aged just five, Saroo Brierley lost all contact with his family in India, after waiting at a train station for his brother who never returned. NOMINATED FOR SIX OSCARS, INCLUDING BEST PICTURE, SUPPORTING ACTOR AND SUPPORTING ACTRESS. ![]()
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