A Long Way Home

by Saroo Brierley

  Once the chance of my having changed trains was factored in, there was no way of determining which of the two routes I was most likely to have taken. A switch at Bhusawal might have sent me snaking east, but I might also have successfully switched to a train heading back north toward Burhanpur, then slept through the stop and been dragged off on the northeast route to Kolkata. Perhaps the southbound train I originally boarded turned back north at some point while I slept, or maybe the carriage I was on was transferred to another engine, which did the same. I had to concede I was unlikely to ever work this particular equation out—it would remain a mystery.

  I felt that if I couldn’t know for certain that I was retracing my trip exactly, then which route I chose maybe didn’t really matter—the point was to travel the distance and get a sense of the immensity of the journey, and perhaps to shake loose some more buried memories or put some lingering ones to rest. I wanted to recall more of the details of my trip to figure out how I’d arrived in Calcutta, yet not stir up some of the terrifying things that happened to me when I was lost. With that in mind, I thought I’d stick with my main memory of being trapped aboard for the duration and take the most direct, northeasterly path. To be completely honest, I chose this also partly because it was the easiest to organize and the most comfortable—there was a service that left Burhanpur at dawn, whereas the southerly route required further travel to Bhusawal late at night and waiting until the wee hours for a train headed east.

  The train I decided I would take, then, was the Kolkata Mail, which had plied the same route in the eighties, when it was known as the Calcutta Mail. It started in Mumbai, on India’s west coast, and reached Burhanpur at 5:20 a.m.—which is why I needed to be there overnight—before making its way to its namesake eastern capital. In fact, this particular service wasn’t very likely to be the one I boarded as a child, even if I did somehow end up on the northeasterly route. It was scheduled to stop at Burhanpur Station for just two minutes, during which time a conductor would check off the names of the new passengers.

  How could I have jumped on and fallen asleep before it left the station? And I know there was no conductor around back then; indeed, it’s a mystery how I didn’t see one during my entire ordeal. Conductors are a regular presence on interstate trains, which is one of the reasons I couldn’t get far out of Kolkata when I was trying to find my way back: because I was avoiding conductors, I was probably unwittingly boarding only local trains. (There was an element of luck in this: if I had succeeded in leaving Kolkata, the chances were strong that rather than being taken to Madhya Pradesh, I would have ended up somewhere else again, amplifying the problem. I could have been doubly, then trebly lost. Outside Kolkata, I was unlikely to have been taken to an adoption agency.)

  I didn’t want thoughts about retracing my steps exactly to complicate things further. So having chosen the Kolkata Mail with the help of Rochak and Swarnima, everything was put in place. When the car to Burhanpur arrived, I set off for a final visit to my mother. By this time, Swarnima had returned to work in Pune, where she lived, but fortunately Cheryl was able to help with our last few minutes of conversation over a parting cup of chai. We posed for family photographs together; looking at those photos now, I find it striking how much I resemble my mother and siblings.

  My mother and Cheryl accompanied me out to the car, and we passed a crowd of curious locals who’d gathered to watch the lost boy take his leave from his family again. This was an especially wrenching departure—we were re-enacting the day I got lost. The last time I’d left on this particular journey, as a child, I hadn’t said good-bye; now a quarter of a century later, my mother hugged me tightly, smiling all the while. Although it must have been as emotional for her as it was for me—even more so—this time she wasn’t worried that I wouldn’t come back. She knew for absolute certain now that we would always find each other.

  I spent the evening in the courtyard restaurant of my hotel in Burhanpur, watching the last skyrockets of people’s Diwali festival stockpiles light up the sky. I knew taking the Kolkata Mail wouldn’t solve all the mysteries of my original journey. In fact, I was nervous at the prospect of the trip and about which other memories—recollections that have been the cornerstone of my identity—it might challenge.

  • • •

  I’d been told it was a good idea to get to Burhanpur Station an hour early to be on the safe side, so when I eventually turned in, I set my alarm for ten past three in the morning. I needn’t have bothered—a knock on my door woke me, and I opened it to a young man in a military jacket, his face almost entirely obscured by a head scarf, who identified himself as an auto rickshaw driver booked for me by the hotel desk. The hotel had no hot water, so I woke myself up with a jet of cold water and at four o’clock checked out and stepped into the darkness outside. We loaded my luggage into the three-wheeler auto and zoomed off down silent streets, past new blocks of flats, fully built, half built, and according to the many colorful billboards, coming soon. I saw these signs all over India, each one boasting a new building with a gym, pool, and all the mod conveniences, which reflected the economic boom.

  It was cool before the sun rose. I had barely slept from the anticipation of my journey, so the cooler air was a welcome help in keeping me awake. Around us, I saw silhouettes of cows sleeping under awnings and pigs huddled together.

  We pulled up outside the station, where a few people sat around in groups and others slept on the ground, blankets pulled up to cover them entirely, which made them look unsettlingly like they were in body bags. Inside, a brightly lit red sign told me the train was an hour late. So much for careful planning.

  I had ample time to look around the station from which my first journey to Kolkata had begun. Even though it seemed much the same as I remembered it, some things had changed. I recalled the platform benches were made with wooden slats, including the one I slept on that first night. Now the seats were of polished granite within a wooden frame. Also, while Ganesh Talai seemed much filthier now than when I was little, back then the Burhanpur station had been dirty and full of litter but now was very clean. On the wall there was a poster of a police officer nabbing a man spitting on the platform.

  Looking across to the opposite platform, I felt sure it was the one that I’d boarded from, trying to find Guddu. I simply must have traveled south initially, even if I somehow came back through Burhanpur for the northern route. My head swam with all the possible permutations.

  A chai man plying his trade on the other platform noticed me looking over and caught my attention. With little else to do, I waved to him that, yes, I’d welcome a cup. He gestured at me to stay where I was, then jumped down and crossed the tracks, balancing my cup on his metal tray. Just as he’d clambered back onto his platform, a freight train came thundering through the station—an awesome, frightening spectacle. In Australia, trains tend to slow down at stations, but here massive trains hurtled through at regular intervals, shaking the platform. The chai man lived with these trains and judged his timing expertly, but how much harder it would be to make those judgments if you were distracted by grief or guilt.

  I couldn’t help imagining what would happen if you made a mistake. Was that what had happened to Guddu?

  Despite the confusion about which platform I’d boarded from and whether I’d stayed aboard a single train, I still have clear, if disjointed, images in my head of the train journey itself. Clambering aboard and looking for Guddu, then curling up on one of the seats and going back to sleep. Wakening to bright daylight in an empty carriage, hurtling along. I have some memory of the train stopping at least at one point along its route, with no one around, and of always being unable to open any of the doors to the outside. I was confused and frightened, and I suppose it’s not surprising I didn’t keep good track of time. It must have felt an eternity to a child of that age.

  • • •

  By small degrees daylight came, and people were still arri
ving at the platform in dribs and drabs—apparently the train’s late arrival was predictable. Some were wrapped up as if the temperature was below freezing—in such a hot place, the dawn cool could be uncomfortable for the locals. They hefted all manner of suitcases, bags and bundles, and domestic appliances taped up tightly in cardboard cartons. As the light strengthened I saw the big water tower behind the station, which had helped me identify Burhanpur from the sky. I was lucky it hadn’t been knocked down or moved, or I wouldn’t have recognized the place.

  The Kolkata Mail slipped into the station as dawn arrived. It had already traveled five hundred kilometers in eight hours northeast from Mumbai, on the Arabian Sea. I stood at the point at which my assigned carriage was to draw up and, sure enough, a conductor consulted his list before ushering me onto the carriage, where I found my allocated seat. I didn’t plan on doing things quite as hard as I had the first time around—I’d booked a first-class compartment, which I’ll admit I hoped would be like the Orient Express as per Agatha Christie, but it fell a little short. There were no luxury carriages on this train, or staff in starched white uniforms with gold buttons offering gin and tonics on silver trays. The configuration of the carriages was very similar to the low-class one I’d boarded as a child: sets of single seats facing each other at the window, and across the aisle a sort of open compartment of facing bench seats, which could be used for sleeping. The appointments in this class were better, of course, but the worn maroon leather seats were still quite hard. Fortunately, I wouldn’t have to sit for the whole journey. My ticket also bought me one of the bench bunks across the aisle, and at least for the time being, I had the area to myself.

  It’s another mystery that my recollection of my first journey is of my carriage being empty from the first time I woke until its arrival in Kolkata. An empty train carriage in India is unheard of, yet I am certain that mine was. Surely if someone boarded, even a conductor, I would have asked for help. There may have been people traveling in the adjacent carriages, of course, and I wouldn’t have known—I didn’t see or hear anyone else. I had remained sitting in my empty carriage, waiting for someone to open a door. Was the carriage locked up and being hauled off for repair? Did I somehow end up on a work train, not meant for passengers and not a scheduled service at all? If so, why would it have gone all the way to Kolkata?

  As the train started to inch away from the platform, I shivered, remembering how this moment had begun the process of my getting hopelessly lost. But I was here to set something right by confronting the fear I’d had and the circumstances back then, and by traveling the distance again as a more comprehending, capable adult. I was also returning to Kolkata to see again the places where I’d survived on the streets, and to visit Mrs. Sood and the others at Nava Jeevan, the place where my fortunes had taken a dramatic turn. As the train picked up speed and cleared the Burhanpur platform, I looked around the carriage and wondered what personal journeys my fellow passengers were making.

  • • •

  When I was a child, air travel in India was reserved for only the most important people: politicians, business moguls and their families, or Bollywood film stars. The railways were the veins of the country—circulating goods, people, and money. Trains brought glimpses of the more affluent city life to our backwater town in the middle of rural India. It’s not surprising that we spent a lot of time hanging around railway stations watching people come and go, making whatever money we could by selling things to passengers—as Guddu did with the toothbrush and toothpaste packs that got him arrested—or begging for whatever they might give us. The railways were our only connection with the rest of the country—the rest of the world as we knew it—and for most people that’s probably still the case.

  The trains aren’t terribly fast, though. When Swarnima and I booked the Kolkata Mail, I learned that it averaged fifty to sixty kilometers an hour. My Indian college friends had overestimated typical train speeds somewhat, which was lucky, as it made my original search field larger than it ought to have been, based on my faulty recollection of a half-day trip. Had they known how slow the trains were, it might have taken me longer to get around to searching farther afield. I settled back in my seat, with nearly thirty hours of travel ahead of me.

  At first most of my fellow passengers kept to their cabin bunks, catching up on sleep. But eventually people could be heard moving around and murmuring, before curtains were drawn back to reveal traveling families waking up and facing the day.

  We had traveled for just over an hour when I experienced a poignant moment. If it was this northeastern route I had been on as a child, I would have passed through my hometown, Khandwa. I knew we were headed there, of course, but rolling into town just as it was coming to life for the day’s activity inevitably made me wonder if I’d been on this train as a sleeping five-year-old. Had I awakened there, I might well have had the opportunity to get off the train and simply go home, presuming Guddu had met some friends or found something he needed to do. I could have climbed into my own bed, disappointed I hadn’t got to stay away with my brother for longer. And then none of the things that followed—my experiences on the streets in Kolkata, my rescue, and my adoption—would have occurred. I would not be Australian. You would not be reading my story. Instead, I possibly slept through a two-minute stop at Khandwa, not far from where my mother and sister were probably asleep themselves, and was transported away from what would have been a very different life, the one I was born into.

  As thoughts like these trailed through my mind, the day got under way and the sounds on the train became louder. Each voice had to be pitched to overcome the rumbling and clattering of the train on the tracks. Everybody seemed to have a mobile phone, all blaring with ringtones of popular songs from Hindi films, and there was constant conversation. In the background was what sounded like a compilation CD of many different styles of contemporary Hindi music, including jazz and even what seemed to be Hindi yodeling. Wallahs began their regular trips up and down the carriage, selling food and drink with a sort of chant: “Chai, chai, brek-fist, brek-fist, om-lit, om-lit.”

  Stretching my legs on a little walk, I found the pantry car, where cooks stripped to the waist fried huge quantities of chickpea and lentil snacks in boiling oil, as well as mountains of sliced potato in vast vats. The vats and pots rested on bricks and were heated by enormous jets of gas, and the cooks tended them with long wooden paddles—it was amazing to watch them do all this on a bumpy train.

  There weren’t any carriages on the Kolkata Mail like the one I’d been trapped in, with barred windows and the rows of hard wooden benches. You also couldn’t walk between the carriages on that train—the doors only opened onto the platform. It seemed more and more likely that on my first trip, I’d been in some sort of carriage that wasn’t in use—the bustle and noise of an Indian train are inescapable, and the chance that the carriage would otherwise have remained empty was nil.

  As we traveled northeast, the landscape out the window was as I remembered it—flat, dusty, and seemingly endless—although this time I was composed enough to see some of the texture and details of the place: expanses of cotton and wheat fields, irrigated crops and chili plants with so many chilis on them they looked red from a distance, as well as the usual cows, goats, donkeys, horses, pigs, and dogs. Combine harvesters worked side by side with bullocks and carts, and farmers harvested by hand, building piles of hay. There were villages of tiny brick-and-plaster houses painted in pastel colors like pale pink, lime green, and faded sky blue, with old roofs of terra-cotta tiles that looked like they could fall off at any moment. We also passed through tiny railway stations painted in the brick red, yellow, and white patterns of Indian Railways. I must have seen a few of these when I hurtled along those decades ago; I must have been begging for the train to stop at one. I wondered whether anyone in these fields looked up at a passing train and saw a small face at the window looking out with fright.

  I thought a
bout Kolkata, and found that I was more anxious than nervous. Even though parts of it would be full of memories, it would also be like visiting a place for the first time. I was lost in Calcutta, but I was returning to Kolkata. Both of us had changed, and I was looking forward to seeing how much.

  Night had begun to descend as I had these thoughts, and by the time I’d folded the seat down and unpacked the Indian Railways linen from its paper covering, it was dark. I lay down on my bunk and found I could still see out the window to watch the lit-up temples, bicycle lights, and house lights flash by as the train rolled on.

  With the train’s bumping and swaying, an unexpected sense of well-being came over me. I felt at ease lying there, bouncing along in my bunk amid the chatter of people speaking in languages that sounded familiar but which I didn’t understand. During the day, I’d had a chat with a curious little boy from the next open compartment. He was about ten years old and keen to try out his school English with “What’s your name?” and “Where are you from?” He seemed to be able to tell that I was not from India despite my looks—maybe it was my clothes, or that I didn’t join in conversations in Hindi or Bengali. When I told him I was from Australia, he mentioned Shane Warne. After talking about cricket for a bit, he asked me, “Are you married?” When I said I wasn’t, he told me how disappointed he was for me. “Who are your family?” he asked next, and I found myself hesitating. “My family lives in Tasmania, but I also have family here, in Khandwa, in Madhya Pradesh,” I said at last. That seemed to satisfy him, and I realized that it had also begun to satisfy me.