Long Way Home

by Saroo Brierly

  Moreover, I didn’t know what to expect—possibly even dangerous situations in such an unpredictable country—and I didn’t want to have to worry about everyone else or be distracted by them. Alone, I would just have the facts of my situation, and my own response to it, to deal with.

  Maybe ultimately my reasoning was even simpler than that: this was my journey, and thus far I’d made it by myself, from the trains to the late nights on the Internet—it just felt right that I complete it alone.

  Thankfully, Lisa said she understood. But my parents were more insistent. Dad promised that they would keep out of the way and let me do what I needed to do on my own. Or perhaps just he could come, for support and to help with any problems? He would stay in the hotel, but at least he’d be on hand. “I won’t slow you down,” he said. Although these were kind and well-meaning offers, my mind was already made up.

  However, it was eleven months after I first identified Ganesh Talai before I stepped foot on the plane. Apart from my childhood flight to Australia, this was my first major trip anywhere, and in addition to the normal travel stuff, there were more than the usual administrative questions to resolve—even the matter of citizenship. When I had arrived from India, my passport showed that I was an Indian citizen. But it was not entirely accurate: it also stated that I was born in Calcutta, which, of course, was incorrect, but the Indian authorities couldn’t very well leave the forms blank. Now I am an Australian citizen; my Indian citizenship had expired but it hadn’t been officially canceled. Little bureaucratic details like these took time to work through.

  Bureaucracy aside, though, the truth was that I was putting things off. I tried not to show it—and didn’t even really acknowledge it to myself—but I was extremely anxious about the trip. Not only were there the questions of whether I’d found the right place and whether there’d be anyone there to reunite with; the prospect of returning to India also meant I had to face up to some bad memories. I wondered how I’d handle it.

  Still, I booked my ticket, refused offers of company, and tried to prepare myself as best I could. Support came from unusual quarters. When I went to the medical clinic for the necessary vaccinations, my doctor asked the reason for my travel. Although I had generally kept my story to myself and close friends, now that I felt I’d found my home, I was less guarded about it, and for some reason I told him a little, and then a lot, about what was taking me to India. He was stunned and thanked me for sharing the incredible details. As I returned for follow-up vaccinations, others at the office had heard about my story, and I received a lot of attention from well-wishers. It was nice to feel that this other team was on my side in the weeks leading up to my departure, and it helped keep me in good spirits.

  When the day finally came, Mum, Lisa, and I had a final cup of coffee together at the airport and went through the possible scenarios that awaited me once more. They told me to try to take it as it came, and not to get overwrought in terms of what I wanted to happen. Perhaps I hadn’t done such a great job of disguising my anxiety, after all. Then Mum handed me a sheet of photos she had scanned from when I was a little boy. It had been twenty-five years since I’d been seen in India—even my own family might need help recognizing me. It was an extremely smart parting gift—I couldn’t believe that with all my fretful preparations, I hadn’t thought of it myself, but that probably reveals a lot about my state of mind at the time.

  Even then, I lingered with final good-byes and was the last to board the plane. Mum looked at me nervously, and that triggered my own worries once more. Was I doing the right thing? Did I really need to find out about the past when I had all of these people who loved me very much here with me now?

  Yes. Of course, the answer was yes. I had to find out where I was from, if I could, even if only to put it behind me. I wanted to at least see the place I had been dreaming about for decades.

  I got on the plane.

  10.

  Meeting My Mother

  When I landed on February 11, 2012, in the city of Indore, the biggest city in Madhya Pradesh, my feet touched the ground in India for the first time since I left as a child. In the pre-dawn dark, I felt a rush of adrenaline as the magnitude of this journey hit me.

  India didn’t exactly welcome me back. My first experiences firmly established me as a stranger—I might have come “home,” but this was a country foreign to me. My bag was missing from the luggage claim carousel. When I tried to ask an airport official where it might be, he replied in what I think was Hindi and I didn’t understand a word. The official soon went to fetch someone who spoke some English. It seems a little thing to not speak the language, but it carried extra weight for a man making an emotional journey home after years of being lost. It was like being lost all over again, unable to understand what anyone said or to make people understand me.

  I made a mess of negotiating my way out of several insistent but exorbitant offers of a taxi to the hotel where I was staying overnight before going on to Khandwa, and I eventually found the courtesy bus. The sun blazed into life as the bus pulled out of the airport, and I got my first look at the pressing confusion of twenty-first- century India.

  At first much of it looked like the India I had known a quarter of a century earlier. I saw black wild pigs scavenging in side streets, recognizable trees on street corners, and the familiar press of people everywhere. The poverty was still evident, but I was quickly struck by how much dirtier everything appeared from how I remembered it. People were relieving themselves on the roadside and there was rubbish strewn everywhere—I didn’t remember the same things from my own neighborhood, but maybe I’d become accustomed to the clean, open spaces of Hobart.

  When I stepped off the bus at the hotel, the unrelenting noise of heavy traffic and the strong smell of sulfur, from drains and sewerage, hit my senses. I realized that after such a long time, Khandwa would probably seem different, too. I was exhausted and decided to try to rest a bit before trying to find a driver to take me to Khandwa. After a fitful few hours’ sleep, I organized a car and driver who said he would take me there the next day.

  Khandwa was two hours away, and I paid half of what the drivers at the airport had quoted me for the few kilometers’ ride to the hotel. But perhaps you paid extra for safety: my short, skinny driver took to the roads like a maniac (even by the famously carefree standards of India), which added another shot of adrenaline to my overloaded system. The road from Indore runs through hills and valleys, but I noticed little of the scenery. We stopped occasionally for a chai and a cigarette and I found myself growing more and more anxious about what awaited me in Khandwa. The death- defying trip couldn’t go quickly enough.

  Under a hot sun in clear skies, we approached the outskirts of town. I didn’t recognize the place at all, which gave me an instant chill. The area had a dusty gray industrial look that I wasn’t familiar with. Suddenly, I decided to go straight to the railway station before the hotel—I was past dragging things out, and that would be the quickest and easiest way to discover whether what I had worked out on my laptop back at home in Tasmania was right. We changed direction.

  The roads were narrow and traffic slowed to a crawl—it was Sunday and people were out and about everywhere. When I was little, there had been more horses and carts than auto rickshaws, but now the streets were clogged with cars and motorbikes.

  My mobile phone had a GPS service, which would have laid out a street map for me, but my battery was low and I wanted my memory to be jolted into service. So I directed the driver to the best of my memory, and, sure enough, we found the station where I expected it to be. My spirits lifted.

  The station looked a little different from how I remembered it, but I found that I instantly had my bearings—from this point, I could find my way to anywhere in Khandwa. I knew where I was . . . and I wasn’t far from home.

  At that point, exhaustion overwhelmed me. I felt like a puppet with his strings cut. Since I arrived in India—and for a long while before that—I had been runni
ng on nervous energy, but now that I knew I was in the right place, I was drained. I asked the driver to take me to the hotel—I’d walk the streets the next day.

  As the taxi crawled through the streets of Khandwa, I tested them against my memory. I remembered the place being green, with trees everywhere, less industrialized and polluted, and certainly with no garbage in the streets. The buildings looked much shabbier than I had pictured them. But when we drove through an underpass beneath the train tracks with barely any overhead clearance, memories of just such a claustrophobic road came flooding back. It was surely the one where I had played as a child.

  At the Hotel Grand Barrack—as the name suggests, it was once a British army barracks—I inadvertently offended my driver by offering no baksheesh, or tip. From being in Australia, I simply wasn’t used to paying more than the agreed amount, and I walked inside the hotel before I realized my mistake. I checked in, feeling like I was carrying around a culture clash.

  Exhausted by my discoveries and the lengthy travel, I put my suitcase down in my hotel room, switched on the air-conditioning and overhead fan, and collapsed on the bed.

  But tired as I was, I couldn’t settle. Perhaps I was overwrought, but I thought: What the heck am I doing? I’ve been sitting on planes for an eternity, squashed in a car for two hours more. . . . Get going! It was Sunday, two o’clock; I had come a long way to find my home. I grabbed my daypack and water bottle and felt a surge of excitement.

  Standing outside the hotel, I didn’t know which way to go first—roads and lanes led off in every direction—so I retraced the route the car had taken. Soon I was walking on the road parallel to the railway line, striding back toward the center of town.

  Despite a certain familiarity with the streets, I couldn’t quite say that I knew precisely where I was. So much was different, I just couldn’t be sure. Doubts began to creep back into my mind—after all, how different could railway stations and underpasses look in Indian towns and cities, and how many towns and cities were there? Might I have made a mistake? But my feet seemed to know the way, as though I was on automatic, and jet lag, fatigue, and the surreal nature of the experience made me feel like I was observing my progress from outside myself. I was failing to take Mum’s advice to remain calm and keep my expectations low. Instinct, memory, doubt, and excitement were all coursing through me at once.

  After a while, I came upon a small green mosque—Baba, the holy man’s mosque. I had forgotten all about it! It looked similar to what I now remembered; more run-down and of course smaller, but the resemblance was still reassuring. I began to feel again that I was on the right track. But I still relentlessly questioned everything I saw—Did it look like that? Is this mission right? Am I going the right way?

  A bit farther up the road, my instinct told me to turn left, to head toward the center of Ganesh Talai. I began to tremble and my pace slowed. This didn’t look right at all. There were too many houses; it was too built up. I tried to calm myself down—things change, populations grow. Of course it was more crowded. But if old buildings had been knocked down for new ones, maybe my house was gone, too! That made me shudder, and I hurried on until I came to a small section of open ground that looked like a spot where I used to play.

  At once I both could and could not recognize the spot. It was the same place but different. Then I realized what the difference was: the town now had electricity. There were poles and wires everywhere. When I was growing up, our house was lit with candles and we cooked on a wood stove or with kerosene. Now that the streets were draped with electricity cables, the whole place looked more closed in, busier, transformed.

  I had worked myself up into a state, less, I suspect, about identifying the place and the buildings and more about what else might have changed. Up until this point, I’d deliberately put my mother and family in the back of my mind as best I could. Now I was approaching where they might still be. Despite my best efforts, all sorts of emotions were bubbling to the surface. I decided to start by trying to find the first house my family had lived in while we were still living in the Hindu neighborhood.

  Making my way down a street and into a narrow, twisting alleyway, I saw a woman at its end washing clothes. As I looked down the alley, memories of running around the place flooded through me. I must have been staring, because the woman spoke to me—a strange man in casual Western sportswear, probably rich-looking to her, certainly looking out of place. I think she said something like “Can I help you?” in Hindi, but all I knew to respond with was “No.” I turned and walked on.

  I could no longer delay the inevitable. It was time to face the ultimate point of my journey. It only took a few minutes to walk across the few streets that once separated the Hindu and Muslim areas of the neighborhood. My heart was in my mouth as I approached the place where I remembered the crumbling brick flat to be. And before I could think about what I was expecting, I found myself standing right in front of it.

  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 whe
re 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.