A Long Way Home

by Saroo Brierley

  It looked so tiny to me, but it was unmistakable.

  It was also unmistakably abandoned.

  I stood and stared.

  The rough brick walls were familiar, though the ground level was now plastered with cheap concrete and whitewashed. The doorway to the corner room was in exactly the right place, but the door itself was broken. It was the size of an Australian window. I couldn’t see much through the cracks in the door, so around the corner I peered in through the sole window, barely thirty centimeters square. I couldn’t believe that my entire family of five—though not always at once—had occupied the tiny dark space inside. It was perhaps three meters, or nine feet square. The little fireplace was still there, clearly not used for some time, but the clay water tank was gone. The single shelf was hanging off its brackets. Some of the outer wall’s bricks had fallen away, letting in beams of light. The cowpat-and-mud floor, which my mother had always kept clean swept, was now dusty from disuse.

  While I looked in, a goat chewed at some hay left on a rock by the door, indifferent to my personal ordeal. Although I’d told myself over and over that I couldn’t expect to just fly to India and find my family safe and well in the same place after all this time, it was hard to absorb that I’d found the flat but it was completely empty. Secretly, I had been convinced that if I found my way back home, they’d be here waiting. In a daze, I watched the goat eat, completely hollowed out with disappointment.

  I had no idea what to do next. My search was over.

  As I stood there with no further plan in mind, a young Indian woman holding a baby came out of the next door. She spoke to me in Hindi, and I understood that she was asking if she could help me. I replied, “I don’t speak Hindi, I speak English.” I was jolted out of my slump when she said, “I speak English, a little.” Quickly I said, “This house . . .” and then recited the names of my family: “Kamla, Guddu, Kallu, Shekila, Saroo.” The woman didn’t respond, so I repeated the names and pulled out the sheet of photos Mum had given me before I left. That was when she told me what I couldn’t bear to hear: no one lived here anymore.

  It was then that two men walked over to see what was happening, and it was the second—perhaps in his mid-thirties, and with good English—who looked as I pointed at the photos and then at myself. He told me to wait, and then walked off down an alley. I didn’t have much time to think about what was happening—other people had begun gathering near us, curious as to what was going on and about the presence of a foreigner in these streets where tourists never visit.

  After a couple of minutes, the man returned and said words I’ll never forget: “Come with me. I’m going to take you to your mother.”

  He said it very directly, like an official making an announcement, so bluntly that I just accepted it. I didn’t absorb what he’d said until I’d begun to do as he asked and follow him down an adjacent alley. Then I got goose bumps and my head began to spin—just moments ago I’d given up on twenty-five years of hoping for exactly this moment. Could it possibly be true that this passing stranger knew where my mother was? It seemed too unlikely and too fast.

  After all this time, things were moving at a bewildering pace.

  When we had walked about fifteen meters, the man stopped in front of three women who were standing outside a doorway, all of them now looking in my direction. “This is your mother,” he said.

  I was too stunned to ask which one—I half wondered whether this was a prank.

  Incapable of doing anything else, I looked from one to the next. The first was certainly not her. There was something familiar about the woman in the middle, and the third woman was a stranger. It had to be the woman in the middle. She was slender and seemed so small, with graying hair pulled back in a bun, and wearing a bright yellow floral dress.

  Despite the years, I knew the fine bone structure of her face the instant I looked back at her, and in that moment she seemed to know me, too.

  We looked at each other for a second longer, and I felt a sharp stab of grief that it could take a mother and son even a few moments to simply recognize each other and then a rush of joy that we now had. She stepped forward, took my hands, and held them, and stared into my face with utter wonderment. I was thinking clearly enough in this moment to understand that whatever turmoil I had been experiencing on this journey, at least I’d had some chance to prepare. For my mother, her son had simply reappeared twenty-five years after she’d lost him.

  • • •

  Before either of us uttered a word, my mother took my hand and led me to her house. A long line of people followed, curious to see what was happening with the strange foreigner. Her house was only a hundred meters around the corner. As we walked, she seemed overcome with emotion. She muttered to herself in Hindi, then looked up at me again and again, with tears of joy in her eyes. I was too overwhelmed to say anything.

  My mother’s house, another conjoined dwelling of crumbling brick, was down a dirt alley, and she hustled me inside and sat me down on a bed in the main room. She remained standing and produced a mobile phone from within the layers of her clothing. When I heard her say, “Kallu, Shekila . . .” I understood that she was calling my siblings. They were still here, too? She spoke excitedly on the phone, screaming and laughing, and calling out, “Sheru! Sheru!” It took me a moment to realize that my mother was saying my name.

  I was stunned. Was it possible I’d been mispronouncing my own name all this time?

  The little knot of people that had assembled outside was growing rapidly, and soon there was quite a crowd. They were chatting excitedly to each other and into mobile phones—the miracle of the son returned from the dead was clearly big news, and word was being spread. The house was soon filled with boisterous, celebrating people, with more crowded in the alley outside the front door and even more gathered up on the adjoining street.

  Fortunately, some of these well-wishers spoke a little English, and my mother and I were finally able to talk through translators. The first thing she asked me was “Where have you been?” It would be a little while before I could give her an expansive answer, but I provided a quick sketch of how I came to be lost in Kolkata and adopted in Australia. Not surprisingly, she was astonished.

  My mother told me that the man I had spoken to in the street had come to the house she was visiting and simply said to her, “Sheru is back.” Then he had shown her the sheet of paper with the photographs on it that Mum had given me—which I don’t even remember him taking—and said, “This boy who is now grown into a man is nearby and asking about Kamla, which is you.” That seemed a strange thing to say, but I learned that my mother had converted to Islam many years earlier and had taken the new name Fatima. I think she will always be Kamla to me.

  My mother described her reactions better than I ever could mine: she said she was “surprised with thunder” that her boy had come back, and that the happiness in her heart was “as deep as the sea.”

  When she had seen the photos, she had started shivering and ran from the house into the alley, where she was joined by the two women she had been visiting, and that was where they were when I appeared at the top of the alleyway.

  She said as I walked toward her she had still been shaking and felt cold, with “the thunder in her head” as joyful tears welled in her eyes.

  I had thunder in my head, too. And after all the slowness of travel and the quiet yet highly emotional ups and downs of walking the streets of Ganesh Talai to our old flat, now everything was happening in a mad, chaotic rush. There were people shouting and laughing everywhere, pressing in to get a look at me, a babble of Hindi I couldn’t understand, and my mother smiling and crying. It was too much to comprehend.

  Later I realized that I had been just fifteen meters away from her, literally around the corner, when I turned up in front of our old home, but if that man had not come along and helped me, I might have walked away. I probably would have found he
r in the end, after asking around more, but I’m haunted by the possibility that I might not have, that we might have stood so near to each other and never known.

  We were really only able to talk in fits and starts, what with all the hubbub as messages were translated, and people asked questions, and the story was repeated for the benefit of newcomers. My mother would turn to her friends, grinning widely, then simply look at me or hug me with tears on her face. Then she’d get on the phone again to spread the word to more people.

  There were a lot of questions to be answered, of course. My mother had no idea what had happened to me since the night I disappeared. With so much to fill her in on, it was slow work, but luckily we had the help of an unlikely interpreter, a woman who lived a few doors away, called Cheryl, whose father was British and whose mother was Indian.

  I was so grateful to have Cheryl’s help; with it by degrees I managed to make myself understood to my mother. Later I would be able to tell her everything, but at that first reunion I could only cut through the chaos with the basics: being trapped on a train, ending up in Calcutta, and being adopted and growing up in Australia. That I had come back after so many years was astonishing to my mother; that I’d come from somewhere as far away as Australia was incomprehensible.

  Even at this first meeting, she told me she was grateful to my parents who had raised me in Australia, and that they had the right to call me their son because they had raised me from a child and made me the man I was today. Her only concern for me, she said, was that I should have the very best life I could. It was extremely moving to hear her say these words. She didn’t realize it, but her words took me back to being a little boy at the Nava Jeevan orphanage, deciding whether to accept the Brierleys’ offer of adoption. She allowed me to feel, without reservation, that I’d made the right decision. She also said she was proud of me, which is all anyone can wish to hear from his mother.

  The run-down building my mother now lived in was, in some ways, even more dilapidated than our old abandoned home. The bricks in the front wall were crumbling, leaving obvious gaps. In the front room of about two by three meters, where she slept on the single bed on which she had me seated, two pieces of corrugated iron came down from the roof to a junction, obviously to channel rainwater into a bowl in the small adjacent bathroom, with its squat toilet and tub of water for washing. It disturbed me to see that the way it was built also meant that rain could just blow inside. There was a slightly larger room at the back, serving as a kitchen. But although it was far too small for all the curious people who were trying to get inside, her home was larger than our old place, and at least it had a terrazzo floor rather than compacted dirt. It was in shocking condition, but in the context of Ganesh Talai, it represented a step up, and I knew she would have had to work hard for that. I learned from others that my mother was too old to carry stones on her head on building sites anymore, and so she now worked as a house cleaner. Despite the hardship of her life, she said that she was happy.

  Over the next couple of hours, people continued to arrive, crowding around the barred window and doorway, excitedly chatting and being filled in on the gossip. My mother held court for many groups of visitors, sitting next to me and holding my face or hugging me while she talked, or leaping up to answer the phone, now ringing off the hook.

  Finally, two special guests were ushered inside in quick succession—my brother Kallu and sister, Shekila. When Shekila arrived, with her husband and two sons, our mother was holding me and crying, and my sister burst into tears as I stood to embrace her. Kallu then arrived alone on a motorbike and was stunned to lay eyes on me. We instantly recognized each other, but each of us was seeing his brother as an adult for the first time. Neither of my siblings had had any cause to learn English, so this was another reunion of tears, smiles, and speechless wonder before Cheryl’s assistance with some simple communication. It was bittersweet to be so close to my family and yet still cut off in this fundamental way.

  I had one final pressing question: Where was Guddu? Of all the stories I wanted to hear, his was at the top of the list. What had happened that night in Burhanpur? Was it something he thought about often? Above all, I wanted him to know that I didn’t blame him for anything—I was sure it was an accident, and I’d never stopped looking for him. Now I had finally found my way back.

  That’s when I was told the hardest news I’d ever hear. When I asked my mother about him, she replied sadly, “He is no longer.”

  Guddu had also never returned that night I was lost. My mother found out a few weeks later that he had died in a train accident at age fourteen. She had lost two sons on the same night. I couldn’t imagine how she had borne it.

  If there was one thing more I could have wished for from that visit, it was to see Guddu again, even if only once. It was because I’d missed him so much that I made him take me to Burhanpur. To hear that he had died was devastating.

  Later I learned more about that evening and what my mother thought had happened to us both. At first she was a little annoyed that I’d gone off with Guddu because I was needed to look after Shekila. But the India I began life in was not like Australia, where a child missing for an hour can cause alarm—my mother was herself often gone for days, and even young children might be in and out of the house unsupervised. So initially she wasn’t too concerned. But after a week had passed, she began to worry. It wasn’t unusual for Guddu to be away for weeks, but it was irresponsible of him to keep me away for this long. Kallu hadn’t seen us on his travels and didn’t know whether we’d been around Burhanpur, and my mother started to fear the worst. She had Kallu ask around Khandwa and Burhanpur if anyone had seen us, but they heard nothing.

  A few weeks, possibly a month, after our disappearance, a policeman came to the house. More worried about me, being the youngest and least capable, my mother thought he had come with bad news of where I was, but he hadn’t—he had come about Guddu. He said that Guddu had died in a railway accident and showed her a photo of his body. Guddu was found by the tracks about a kilometer outside Burhanpur, and the policeman was there to ask her to formally identify him. I asked if she had been sure it was him, and she nodded slowly. It was still a very painful subject for her, so I got the rest of the details from Kallu. Guddu had somehow fallen from a moving train, and either went under a wheel or struck something fixed by the side of the track. Half of one of his arms had been severed and he had lost one of his eyes—an unimaginably horrific thing for a mother to have to look at.

  I wanted to visit Guddu’s grave, but my family told me that wasn’t possible—houses had been built over the graveyard he was in, and the builders hadn’t even bothered to move the remains of the dead before they began construction. The owners or developers either didn’t want to know or didn’t care. It wasn’t easy to hear. I felt as if my brother had been taken from me, just as I had been taken from him—disappeared without a trace—and in a corner of my mind I understood a little more of what my family must have felt about my vanishing. We didn’t even have any photographs of Guddu, as we could never afford family portraits. He had been part of us as we had been part of him, and now all that remained of Guddu were our memories.

  I wasn’t sure if my family entirely understood why I was so upset about not having a grave to sit by. For them, Guddu’s death was long in the past, but for me his death happened suddenly that very day. Not being able to properly grieve for my departed brother was a deep-seated loss that I felt strongly long after I returned to Australia. The last thing he had said to me on that platform in Burhanpur was that he would be back. Perhaps he’d never returned; perhaps he’d come back to find me gone. Either way, I’d hoped to be able to be reunited with him. Now I’ll never know what happened that night—some of our mysteries will never be solved.

  My family was now experiencing nearly the opposite. Rather than grieving a sudden, unexpected death, they were rejoicing in a sudden, unexpected, seemingly miraculous homecomin
g. All of these years, they feared that the two brothers had suffered the same fate, or something worse had happened to me. I felt for Kallu particularly: he lost two brothers and suddenly became the eldest male, a charge that came with great responsibility in our community. He would have been seen as equally responsible for the family’s welfare as my mother; a huge weight on his young, bereft shoulders.

  I also learned a little about my father. He was still alive but no longer lived in Khandwa—he’d moved with his second family to Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradhesh, a couple of hundred kilometers to the north—the city that was made famous by a chemical disaster at the Union Carbide plant in the early eighties. The family still hated him for abandoning us, so my curiosity about him would have to wait.

  Amid all the chaos and celebration that day, Cheryl mentioned to me that some of the people there were asking my mother how she could be sure I was her son. Wasn’t it possible that I was an imposter, or that we were both mistaken, swept away in events because we so wanted them to be true? My mother answered that a mother knows her child anywhere—she’d had no doubt I was who I said I was from the first moment she saw me. But there was one way to be completely sure. She held my head in her hands and tilted it, looking for the scar above my eye from when I fell in the street running away from a dog. There it was, on the right side, just above the brow. She pointed to it and smiled—indeed, I was her son.

  • • •

  My mother’s house was full of well-wishers late into the evening. Eventually, I had to go—I was completely sapped, and my head and heart were so full, they felt like they were about to burst. It took a long while to say good-bye to everyone, even without many words in common—there were lots of long looks and hugs. I suppose at the back of everyone’s mind was the question of whether I’d come back after I walked out the door this time. I promised that I would, the next day. Finally, my mother let me go, and watched as I climbed behind Kallu on his motorbike and sped off. I thanked him as I got off at the Grand Barrack and he left for the hour’s ride back to Burhanpur—the town I’d spent so long trying to find—where, ironically, he now lived.