Uneducated and unable to read, he did not know the name of his hometown, let alone the station from which he had begun his terrifying journey.īrierley writes of this time with such honesty and expressiveness, the reader is transported to the terrifying bigness of the world that he inhabited as a lost little boy. But, therein lay the crux of his problem. With an astounding amount of resourcefulness for one so young, he made the conscious decision to solve his problem on his own, living off the trash that piled in abundance and systematically boarding trains that left the hub of the city’s central station, in the hopes of chancing on the one that would take him back home. “The people in the station weren’t people at all but a great solid mass I couldn’t make any impact on, like a river or sky.” He was invisible, simply another child devoured by the city. He says he had been trained, as most poor Indian children were, to stay away from authority figures, for they had always led to trouble. Shock overwhelmed him as he sat in the bustling train station of Calcutta, his mind numb. He was barefoot, with no money, and he was desperately hungry and thirsty after long, panicked hours on the train. The threads that connected his two worlds were gossamer-thin, the faintest of clues embedded in the unyielding memories of his childhood. There is a real feeling of catharsis when reading Brierley’s astounding narrative, in the classic sense of a happy ending, for the journey of the author as a boy - and then again as a young man - evokes the audacity of a fable, but it is set in the real world, a place where wonderment and miraculous occurrences can often seem wanting.īrierley’s story spans three decades, from his earliest years in India as a young boy, where he lived in poverty, but with a wealth of love from his mother and his three siblings, to his life of comfort and affluence in Australia with his adoptive parents and brother. Luckily for readers - and moviegoers - there is such a tale: Saroo Brierley’s memoir “A Long way Home: A Boy’s Incredible Journey from India to Australia and Back Again,” which served as the basis for the highly acclaimed 2016 movie “Lion,” starring Dev Patel. Every once in awhile, a story comes along that seems too remarkable to be true, the sort of miraculous sequence of events that would once have been ready fodder for Oprah Winfrey in her talk show days, or, as it turned out in reality, for a joyful movie, one seemingly larger than life.
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