A Long Way Home

Poverty and survival are central to Saroo’s memoir. Saroo describes being raised by an impoverished single mother in India until the age of five. The family initially shared a house with another Indian family, but later moved to a smaller house in Khandwa’s Muslim neighborhood. The new house lacked electricity and running water. The family shared a single room and slept on a dirt floor alongside vermin that entered through cracks in the walls. The family was so impoverished that neighbors ostracized them, exacerbating Saroo’s isolation as a Hindu living among Muslims.

Saroo’s mother and older brothers worked odd jobs to support the family. Kamla cleared construction sites six days per week, carrying heavy rocks on her head for a daily wage of $1.30. Kamla also rode the trains to neighboring towns in search of work, as did Guddu and Kallu, which left Saroo alone to care for his infant sister. Poverty resulted in child exploitation and neglect. Indeed, Guddu was once jailed for breaking child labor laws, while Saroo became one-year-old Shekila’s full-time caretaker at the age of four. Despite his youth, Saroo contributed to the family’s income by taking odd jobs. On one occasion, a local merchant paid him to transport 10 large watermelons to the town market. The watermelons were so heavy that Saroo lost track of traffic and ended up on the ground bleeding from the head after being struck by a speeding motorbike.

Hunger paints Saroo’s most vivid childhood memories. He describes hunger as a limiting factor that distracts from all other things, and he asserts that hunger stole his childhood. Hunger paralyzed Saroo and kept him overly focused on the moment, rather than thinking about future goals. Hunger also endangered Saroo. In Chapter 2, he recounts being chased by armed guards after he and his brothers stole eggs from a large henhouse. He also recalls squeezing through a gap in a barbed-wire fence to steal tomatoes, only to be chased by five or six older boys. In short, hunger forced Saroo and his siblings to take risks they otherwise would not have taken.

As challenging as poverty was for Saroo, it also fostered his resilience. Having to work, beg, scrounge, and steal made him independent and mature beyond his years. The skills Saroo developed in Khandwa served him well on the streets of Kolkata. By the time Saroo got lost, he was adept at stealing, accustomed to being hungry, and used to navigating the world without adult supervision. Saroo excelled at identifying easy targets for theft. Similarly, he could sense when individuals wanted to help or harm him. These skills proved invaluable during his encounter with a nefarious railway worker and his friend. Saroo survived for weeks alone in Kolkata precisely because he grew up impoverished. Despite his street-smarts, however, it was ultimately luck that saved his life. More than 14 million Indian children died of starvation or illness the year Saroo went missing (133). During this time, lone Indian children also risked being abducted into sexual trafficking and being sold for their organs (risks that remain disturbingly high today). Had Saroo not ended up at an orphanage, he may not have survived to adulthood.

The entwined themes of family, identity, and home recur throughout Saroo’s memoir. Saroo has two families on two different continents. He lived with his Indian mother and three siblings until the age of five. After getting lost in Kolkata, he was adopted and raised by Sue and John in Hobart. Saroo’s adoptive parents strove to make him feel at home by decorating the house with Indian objects, cooking Indian food, and connecting with Indians in their community through various organizations, like the Indian Cultural Society and ASIAC. Their efforts helped Saroo adjust to his new life in Australia, rather than fostering his Indian identity. Despite being adopted, Saroo says he’s not conflicted about who he is. He has two families, not two identities:

After being lost, I’d been lucky enough to be adopted by a loving family, and not only lived somewhere else, but had become someone other than the person I might have been had I stayed in India. I didn’t just live in Australia; I thought of myself as an Australian. I had a family home with the Brierleys, and had made my own home in Hobart with my girlfriend, Lisa. I knew I belonged, and was loved, in those places (220).

Saroo thinks of Sue and John as his ‘real’ parents. His progressive beliefs about family reflect Sue’s influence. His adoptive mother’s turbulent childhood and violent father taught her that actions and feelings make families, not blood ties. Sue’s father never made her feel safe or loved, leading her to conclude that there was “nothing sacrosanct about families formed only by birth parents” (130). Saroo’s experiences in India echoed those of Sue’s. Saroo’s birth father was violent toward Kamla and abandoned the family, leaving them destitute. Thus, like Sue, he rejects the notion that blood relations create families, instead embracing the family Sue and John created when they adopted him and Mantosh.

Saroo’s bond with his parents did not diminish his love for his Indian family. As a child, he strove to keep his memories of India alive by retracing the routes he took to various places in Khandwa, such as the mosque and the train station. Further, he tried to communicate with his mother and siblings by sending them telepathic messages. Saroo never stopped wanting to find his biological family. Only after meeting Indian exchange students at school in Canberra, however, did he begin to look for them in earnest. Using Google Earth, Saroo searched train stations and rail lines leading in and out of Kolkata. His search was long and arduous, but he never gave up hope. It took five years to find his hometown. A few months later, he traveled to India to meet his mother and siblings for the first time in 25 years.

Although Saroo lost Kamla, Guddu, Kallu, and Shekila at a young age, he still thinks of them as family. Similarly, Khandwa is as much a home to him as Hobart:

Finding Khandwa and my Indian family also felt like coming home. Something about being in the place just felt right. I was loved here, too, and belonged in a way I’d not thought much about beforehand and found hard to explain now. This was where I’d spent my first years, where my blood was (220).

Finding his birth family does not lessen the love Saroo has for his adoptive family. Rather, finding them gave him a clearer understanding of his roots and the circumstances of his adoption. Saroo introduced Sue to his Indian relatives in 2017, thereby creating a large familial network linked by biology, adoption, and marriage.