Saroo Brierley

Saroo Brierley (born c. 1981) is an Indian-born Australian businessman and author who, at the age of five, was accidentally separated from his biological family.

He was adopted out of India by an Australian couple but was reunited with his original family 25 years later after finding his hometown via Google Earth.

His story generated significant international media attention, especially in Australia and India.

An autobiographical account of his experiences, A Long Way Home, was published in 2013 in Australia, released internationally in 2014, and adapted into the 2016 Oscar-nominated film Lion, starring Sunny Pawar and Dev Patel as Saroo, David Wenham as his adoptive father, John Brierley, and Nicole Kidman as his adoptive mother, Sue Brierley.

Saroo Brierley was born Sheru Munshi Khan in Ganesh Talai, a suburb within Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh.

His mother was a Hindu of the Rajput caste and his father was a Muslim.

His father worked as a building contractor.

When Saroo was around three years old, his father abandoned the family after taking a second wife, throwing the family into poverty.

His mother, who chose not to petition for a divorce although she legally could have done so, worked in construction to support herself and her children but often did not make enough money to feed them all, and could not afford to send them to school.

Saroo and his elder brothers, Guddu and Kallu, began begging at the local railway station and market for food and money, and Saroo was sent by his mother with a bowl to ask neighbors for leftovers.

Guddu sometimes obtained odd jobs such as washing dishes in a restaurant and sweeping the floors of train carriages.

Saroo and his brothers also resorted to pilfering food from bales of rice and chickpeas at the local railway station as well as unwatched fruit trees and vegetable patches.

At one point, Guddu was arrested for violating child labor laws after selling toothbrush and paste kits at the railway station platform, and despite the law being intended to protect children, was imprisoned for a few days.

One evening, Guddu said he was going to ride the train from Khandwa to the city of Burhanpur, 70 km to the south, and reluctantly allowed the 5-year-old Saroo to join him.

By the time the train reached Burhanpur, Saroo was so tired he collapsed onto a seat on the platform.

Guddu told his little brother to wait and promised to be back shortly.

Guddu did not return, and Saroo eventually became impatient.

He noticed a train parked in the station and, thinking his brother was on it, boarded an empty carriage.

He found there were no doors to the adjoining carriages.

Hoping his brother would come for him, he fell asleep.

When he awoke, the train was travelling across an unfamiliar area.

Occasionally the train stopped at small stations, but Saroo was unable to open the door to escape.

Saroo's rail journey eventually ended at the huge Howrah railway station in Calcutta, West Bengal (now known as Kolkata), and he fled when someone opened the door to his carriage.

Saroo did not know it at the time, but he was nearly 1500 km from his hometown.

On the same night as his separation from his brother, unknown to Saroo, Guddu had been hit and killed by an oncoming train.

Saroo attempted to return home by boarding different trains, but they proved to be suburban trains and each one eventually took him back to Howrah railway station.

For a week or two, he lived on and around Howrah railway station.

He survived by scavenging scraps of food in the street and sleeping underneath the station's seats.

Eventually, he ventured out into the city; and, after days of homelessness on Calcutta's streets, he was found by a railway worker who took him in and gave him food and shelter.

But Saroo fled when the railway worker showed Saroo to a friend and Saroo sensed that something was not right.

The two men chased after him, but he managed to escape.

Saroo eventually met a teenager who took him to a police station and reported that he might be a lost child.

The police took Saroo to a government centre for abandoned children.

Weeks later, he was moved to the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption.

The staff there attempted to locate his family, but Saroo did not know enough for them to sufficiently trace his hometown, and he was officially declared a lost child.

He was subsequently adopted by the Brierley family of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

In the meantime, his mother, Kamla Munshi, searched for her two sons.

A few weeks after her sons failed to return home, police informed her that Guddu's body had been found near the railway tracks, having been killed by an oncoming train a kilometre (0.6 mi) from Burhanpur station.

She then confined her energy to looking for Saroo, travelling to different places on trains.

She never gave up hope that Saroo was still alive and would return some day.