A Long Way Home

by Saroo Brierley

  In turn, I told them my own story. It was completely different describing my time in the train station to people who knew it as Kolkata’s massive Howrah Station, and the river next to it as the Hooghly River. My new friends—especially those from Kolkata, who understood something of the childhood I had led—were gobsmacked. They wanted to know the details: how, what, where, when? I replied with as much information as I could.

  Two things happened as a result of these conversations. First, my past became much more present—which is to say that it returned to the forefront of my mind—than it had been in years. Although I always kept my memories intact by reviewing them mentally, I hadn’t spoken much about them for a long time. I’d told people here and there, mainly girlfriends, but very few—not because I was ashamed of it or wanted to keep it a secret, but because it didn’t seem that important anymore. Each time I told someone, there were a lot of questions that had to be answered, and I felt it changed their view of me in much more fundamental ways than the situation deserved. I became Saroo-who-used-to-live-on-the-streets-in-Calcutta rather than just Saroo, and mostly I wanted to be the Saroo that I’d come to be. The Saroo that was lighthearted, trustworthy, a good listener, and fun to be with.

  Now I was telling my story to people who knew the places I was talking about, which was different. I’m sure it changed their view of me, but I told it to increase the understanding between us rather than open up a gap. And to talk about it like this made my past more immediate. Telling other Australian people had been a little abstract, as though talking about a fairy tale, however much they sympathized and tried to imagine what it had been like. But telling these people, who had firsthand experience of the same places, made it much more real.

  Second, telling my story to people who were actually from India brought out the detectives in them. The whereabouts of my hometown was a mystery they wanted to solve, and they asked me lots of questions. Through their eyes, for the first time since I was in Howrah Station, I saw the possibility of working it out. Here was a bunch of people who knew the country well—the adults I’d searched for on the railway platform twenty years before. Maybe they could help me now.

  So I tried out my meager collection of clues on my friends. It was the first time in many, many years that I had conjured up my ignorant five-year-old’s understanding of the geography of my childhood. There was “Ginestlay,” which might have been the name of my town, but which might equally have been the area or even the street. And then there was the nearby station where I’d boarded the train alone, called something like “Berampur.”

  I reminded my friends that the Kolkata authorities had tried and failed to work out my origins with these fragments, but they still thought it was a good start. I admitted I was hazy on exactly how long I’d been stuck on the train, but that I was certain I had boarded at night and thought I had arrived in Kolkata the next day before noon—it was certainly daytime. Although traumatic experiences such as those I’d had living on the streets seemed to be imprinted on my mind with great detail, the first big trauma—being trapped alone on a train, realizing I was powerless to stop being dragged farther from home—appeared instead to have overwhelmed me. I recalled it more in snapshots of distress. But I had always felt that I had probably traveled for between twelve and fifteen hours, based on my memory of the light and the busyness of my surroundings when I got on and off.

  One of my new friends was a girl called Amreen. When I came to know her a little better, I asked her if she could help me. I knew her dad worked for the Indian Railway in New Delhi for most of his life, and I thought perhaps he might know the train station in my hometown.

  “Hey Amreen, are you able to ask your dad if he could help me find a place called ‘Berampur’? Or ‘Ginestlay’?” I gave her the names of the places I remembered, probably about half a day away from Kolkata.

  “Sure, I’ll ask him. Anything to help,” she replied.

  I was excited and agitated—this was as close to help as I’d ever been.

  A week later, Amreen’s father responded. “I’ve never heard of ‘Ginestlay,’ but there’s a suburb of Kolkata called Brahmapur. There is also a city called Baharampur in a more remote region of the same eastern state of West Bengal, and a city in the state of Orissa, down the east coast, formerly known as Berhampur and now also named Brahmapur.”

  “Thanks so much! This is a big help,” I replied.

  • • •

  The first one—the suburb actually in Kolkata—was obviously not the one. But it made me wonder why no one I’d asked at Howrah Station had thought this was the place I was after. Maybe my pronunciation was wrong, or else they didn’t pause for long enough to listen to what I was saying.

  The second and third places didn’t seem much more likely. I didn’t think they were far enough away from Howrah Station for the journey I’d been on, although I supposed it was possible I’d been on a circuitous route. The Orissan city was less than ten kilometers from the east coast, but I’d never seen the ocean until I flew over it to Australia—I’d once gone on a memorable trip to watch the sun set over a lake not far from my hometown in India, but the sight of the open sea below the plane astonished me. Could I have grown up so close to the coast but never known it? On the other hand, my friends thought that, based on the way I looked, I might have come from West Bengal, which was tucked in the eastern part of the country next to Bangladesh. That reminded me that when I was growing up in Hobart, Mum had told me some elderly Indians we met had thought it likely I came from the east. Could I be remembering the train journey wrong? Might the time and distance have been exaggerated in the mind of a frightened five-year-old?

  Little seeds of doubt were being sown in my mind.

  • • •

  In addition to the hunches of my friends, I started to use the Internet to search for more information. We’d had Internet at home since my later years at school, but it was a very different medium from what it is today. It was much slower, of course, especially in the pre-broadband dial-up days, but what we call the Internet now was only just getting started as “the Web” when I was finishing school. Tools like Wikipedia were in their infancy by the time I started college. Today it’s hard to imagine that you could fail to turn up information on any topic at all—regardless of how obscure—but it wasn’t long ago that the Internet was more the preserve of geeks and academics.

  This was also before social media, when it was not common to connect with people you didn’t already know. E-mail was a more formal communication tool, not something with which you could reach out to the world anonymously. Adding to the fact that I wasn’t thinking much about my Indian past, it just hadn’t crossed my mind before that this reasonably new invention could be of some use to me.

  At college I had twenty-four-hour access to the Internet and my own computer in my room. So I started searching for any kind of information I could find using various spellings of “Ginestlay,” with no success or at least not the kind of success that I could make any real sense of. The “Berampur”-type names were similarly inconclusive—too many possibilities and nothing much to go on.

  If I’d begun to have doubts about my memories of these names and the length of time I was on the train, I had none about my memories of my family, or the town and the streets I’d walked as a child. I could close my eyes and see clearly the train station in “Berampur” where I climbed aboard the train: the position of the platform, the big pedestrian overpass at one end, and the large water tower on its high platform rising above. I knew that if I could just see any of the places that had been suggested by my friends or my search engine, or if I could somehow see what someone thought was my hometown, I could tell straightaway if it was. It was the names that I couldn’t be sure of.

  Maps didn’t help, either. I knew that somewhere among all the names and lines was my home, if only I knew the right place to look, but the only maps I could find weren’t big e
nough to show small villages, let alone neighborhoods or the detailed street plans I needed. All I could do was look for names that seemed similar, scanning likely areas based on their proximity to Kolkata and my own appearance. And even if I found a town name similar to “Berampur” or “Ginestlay,” how could I tell if our tumbledown dwelling or the right train station was there? For a while, I even toyed with the idea of flying to West Bengal to search on the ground, but that wasn’t a very serious proposition. How long could I possibly ramble through parts of India looking for a familiar clue? The place was enormous. It was too much like jumping on random trains at Howrah Station.

  Then I became aware of a map that actually would allow me to roam across the landscape, and what was even better was that I could do it from the security of my study chair: Google Earth.

  Many people probably remember their first experience of Google Earth. Its satellite imaging meant anyone could look at the world from above, sweeping across it like an astronaut. You could view whole continents, countries, or cities, or search for place-names and then zoom down on the spots you were interested in, rendered in astonishing detail—up close to the Eiffel Tower, or Ground Zero, or your own house. In fact, that seemed to be what everyone typically did first—zeroed in on where they lived and saw what it looked like from above, like a bird or a god. When I heard what Google Earth could do, my heart raced. Might my childhood home be visible if I worked out where to look? Google Earth was the perfect tool. It was almost as if it was invented just for me. I got on my computer and began searching.

  As I’d never got even a flicker of recognition from anyone about “Ginestlay,” I thought that the place sounding like “Berampur” was the most solid reference I had. And if I found it, my hometown would be close by along the train line. So I searched for places like “Berampur” and, as always, the results were numerous—there were a large number of variations of the name strung across the length and breadth of India, and multiple places sharing some of them. Brahmapur, Baharampur, Berhampur, Berhampore, Birampur, Burhampoor, Brahmpur . . . on and on they went.

  It seemed sensible to start with the two places Amreen’s father had suggested, in West Bengal and Orissa. Slowly but surely, aerial images of each town appeared on the screen—the way Google Earth worked was exactly as I’d hoped. With this tool, I would be able to see any landmarks I remembered, and hopefully identify the right place almost as easily as if I were there in person, or at least as if I were there in a hot air balloon. Looking down at a place from above meant twisting your mind a little to imagine it from the street.

  Baharampur in West Bengal had a couple of train stations, but they didn’t have the overpass I distinctly remembered, and there didn’t appear to be any place on the lines out of town with a name like “Ginestlay,” either. One line also ran close to several large lakes that I was sure would be visible from a train, but I’d never seen anything like them where I’d been. In fact, the surroundings of the town didn’t seem right at all—the place I was looking for had a range of hills nearby that the train line ran through, which I couldn’t see close to this place, and everything looked too green and lush. The region I came from was a patchwork of farmland around dusty towns. I had to concede that changes could have occurred since my time there—maybe more irrigation had been brought in and the region had become greener. But the other factors seemed to rule it out.

  The city in Orissa, Brahmapur, seemed to be in a drier region, but its station had very long covered platforms on either side of the tracks, which was different from the simpler configuration I remembered. There was no water tower to be seen, either; instead, there were lots of silos of some kind, which I had no memory of. Once again there was no “Ginestlay” along the lines near this place. And seeing an image of how close the sea was to the city made me certain I couldn’t have been unaware of it.

  That neither of these looked right was no reason to give up hope since there were still so many other places to look at, but it was disheartening. And it made me consider how much things might have changed since I’d been there. Stations might have been refurbished or rebuilt, roads changed nearby, towns grown. If too much had changed, I might not find it easy to recognize the station I was looking for after all.

  Despite the comprehensive nature of this new resource—or because of it—it was clear that searching for my home was going to be a mammoth task. If I wasn’t certain about the place-names, I couldn’t rely on the search function to deliver the answer. And even if I stumbled upon the right area, perhaps I wouldn’t be able to recognize it from the air. How could I be certain about anything? On top of all of that, Internet speeds and computers were much slower then—Google Earth was an incredible tool but a massive one, and using it to look over great distances would be hugely time-consuming.

  If I was going to take my studies seriously, I wouldn’t be able to spend all my time scouring Google Earth. So after the initial excitement, I told myself I was just mucking about and tried not to get too distracted by it. I put some time into checking out a few places, concentrating on the northeast regions around Kolkata for several months on and off. But I didn’t find anything familiar.

  For a while, some of my friends got used to my announcing that I’d given up the search, only to admit later that it was still playing on my mind. Many of the original Indian sleuths had returned home, and others let the issue go when it seemed I might not be as troubled by it as they had first thought.

  Eventually, I let the whole thing slide. The quest started to seem a little abstract. It was hard to feel I was making any progress—I was searching for the needle in the haystack, and the task seemed beyond the commitment I could give it. I was at college to study, which required a great deal of my attention, and I didn’t want to squander it as a hermit at a computer the rest of the time. Some well-meaning people even warned me that the search could drive me crazy. I’d grown up an Australian man in a loving family. Fate had delivered me from dire straits into a comfortable existence—perhaps I needed to accept that the past was past and move on.

  I realize now that I was also a little scared and defensive of my memories—I’d lived with them for so long, and clung to them so tightly, that I wanted very passionately to preserve them and the kernel of hope they contained. If I went back and searched, and failed to find anything, would that mean I really did have to draw a line through the past and move on? If I could find no trace of my home and family, how would I keep holding on to their memory? Going back without certainty might ruin the little I had.

  • • •

  With the trail cool, I completed my course and moved back to Hobart in 2009, and found a bar job to support myself. Despite the diploma in my back pocket, it only took a few weeks for me to realize I’d lost interest in the hospitality industry. I’d had an inkling this was the case while still in Canberra, but I had wanted to at least complete the qualification, having come as far as I had.

  We all reach a point as young adults when we wonder what we should be doing with our lives—or, at the very least, which direction to point ourselves in. Beyond the means to get by, we need to think about what’s most important to us. Not surprisingly, I discovered that for me the answer was family. Perhaps being away from Hobart for a while had strengthened this feeling. And my renewed interest in my past had prompted me to think about my relationship with my family in Hobart. It occurred to me that the Brierley family business might give me an opportunity to draw aspects of my life together, and I was excited when my parents agreed.

  Mum and Dad own a business selling industrial hoses and fittings, valves, and pumps. In a remarkable coincidence, Dad started the business the day I arrived from India—he left my granddad in the brand-new office to answer any calls when he set off to Melbourne with Mum to meet me.

  Joining the business meant working with Dad every day, and I quickly realized that I’d made the right choice. Working with him was inspirational. I think that som
e of his determination, work ethic, and focus on success rubbed off on me. He certainly kept me busy, and the experience brought us even closer. Mantosh later took the same path, so now the Brierley men all work together.

  At the same time, I threw myself into a new relationship with a woman that I met through friends. Eventually, my girlfriend and I moved in together. The move back to Hobart and all that followed reminded me that tracing my roots was not the most important thing in my life, overriding all else. I understand that this may sound strange to some people. Adoptees, whether or not they ever knew their birth parents, often describe the constant, gnawing feeling of there being something missing: without a connection, or at least the knowledge of where they are from, they feel incomplete. But I didn’t feel that. I never forgot my Indian mother and family—and I never will—but being separated from them didn’t create a block that somehow prevented me from pursuing a full and happy life. I’d learned quickly, as a matter of survival, that I needed to take opportunities as they came—if they came—and to look forward to the future. Part of that was gratefully accepting the life I was granted through my adoption. So I tried to concentrate again on that which I have been so blessed to have been given.