Long Way Home

by Saroo Brierly

  We talked a lot during this visit about how the family had never entirely written off the idea that I might come back. My mother had seen Guddu’s body and therefore knew for sure he had died, but she admitted that they didn’t mourn me as they did him because they couldn’t quite believe I was dead. They had received some curious assurance in this belief. My mother never stopped praying for my return, and visited many priests and religious leaders in the community, asking for help and guidance. They always told her I was healthy and happy in good circumstances, and, amazingly, if asked where I was, they would point a finger to the south and say, “He’s in that direction.”

  They did what they could to find me. It was an impossible task, of course—they had no idea where I could have gone. But my mother spent every spare bit of money looking for me—paying people to search, and even occasionally traveling around the area herself, from town to town, asking for any word. Kallu said they had talked a lot with police in Burhanpur and Khandwa—and that he had worked extra time to earn more money to help fund the family’s searches. They never learned anything.

  They couldn’t have had “child missing” posters printed even if they could have raised the money, because there weren’t any photos of me. Praying was all they had left to do.

  I began to realize that just as my search for my mother had in some ways shaped my life, her faith that I was alive had shaped hers. She couldn’t search, but she did the next best thing: she stayed still. In conversation, I had wondered why she was still living in Ganesh Talai, when she could have gone to Burhanpur and lived with Kallu and his wife. She replied that she had wanted to stay near the house she had been living in when I disappeared, so that if I ever returned, I would be able to find her. I was bowled over by the thought. It’s true that if she’d moved farther away, I would have had no chance of tracking her down. The strength of my mother’s maternal instincts—her belief that I hadn’t died and that I would someday return—seems to me now one of the most incredible aspects of this whole story.

  I’ve experienced so many coincidences that I’ve just learned to accept them—even to be grateful for them. Kallu and Shekila told me they had always treasured their memories of us playing together and taking baths together as children—all the fun and mischief of our earliest years. Right from the start in Hobart, I used to imagine them in India each night before I went to sleep. I, like them, would think about the good times we had shared together, and tried to send my mother messages that I was all right and thinking of her and the family, hoping that they were still alive and well. Could a strong emotional bond create a kind of telepathic connection? It sounds far-fetched, but I’ve been through so much that defies reason that I can’t entirely dismiss the idea. It seems to me that somehow the message was received.

  Finally, my mother told me that one day she was praying to Allah for blessings on her family when an image of me appeared in her mind. The very next day, I walked back into Ganesh Talai and into her life.

  During this visit, we also talked about how our lives were changing since my return. My mother told me that because of the publicity from the news reports, many families wished for their daughters to marry me, but she wanted me to know that any decision about marriage would be my decision and mine alone. I tried again to explain about Lisa, and that although we were very happy together, we didn’t have any immediate plans to marry. She looked a little skeptical. My brother and sister were both married and had children; my mother said her only desire was that I did the same before she died, or, as she put it, before she “saw the road to God.” She wanted me to have someone to take care of me in this world before she left it.

  Both Kallu and Shekila said they would like to visit Australia at some point, although my mother felt too frail to make the journey. Shekila said she didn’t need to see kangaroos or the Sydney Opera House, but she did want to see the house in which I was raised. They wanted to meet my Australian family, and told me they prayed for them every day at the mosque.

  One of the most touching things my mother said to me was that if I ever wanted to come back to live in India, she would build me a home and go out and work hard so that I could be happy. Of course, my intention was the reverse: I wanted to give her a home and do everything I could to make her happy.

  Money can be a tricky subject in families, but I wanted to share the good fortune I’d had. By the standards of my Indian family, I was a wealthy man, with an annual salary they could only dream about. But I was aware that I had to tread carefully, because I didn’t want the issue of money to complicate or taint our new relationship.

  The four of us discussed what arrangements would be of most benefit. My mother’s new work as a house cleaner earned her about 1,200 rupees a month—a much greater sum than she earned when I was little but still a pittance, even in the context of regional India. We worked out a way for me to supplement her income. When I told my siblings I wanted to buy my mother a house, we discussed whether she might leave Ganesh Talai and live closer to Shekila or Kallu. But she was happy where she knew people well, and now that I’d returned, she decided that she wanted to stay in the neighborhood she had lived in all her life. So we resolved to find her something there, possibly even the place she was in now but with some much-needed repairs.

  Inevitably, the subject of my father came up. My brother and sister were both completely unforgiving of him. They didn’t doubt he would have seen the publicity surrounding my return but were adamant they’d turn him away if he appeared, however contrite he was. He had abandoned us when we were children and needed his help, and they felt he had to live with the decision he’d made. They also blamed him for the loss of Guddu—if he hadn’t left us, Guddu wouldn’t have been forced into his dangerous work on the railways. In their view, the lines of fate went back from Guddu’s death and my disappearance to the day that my father brought his new woman into our home and presented her to our then-pregnant mother.

  But although my family had sworn they would never have anything to do with him again, no matter what the circumstances, I couldn’t find it in myself to feel the same. If my father genuinely regretted his behavior, then I could forgive him. Perhaps because I’d also made a decision that spiraled out of my control, I could imagine that he might have made a bad decision, and everything else had rolled forward from there. I couldn’t hate him for making mistakes. He remained my father—even if I didn’t really know him—and couldn’t help but feel that my reunion with my past was incomplete without his role in it.

  I had always had doubts he would be interested in seeing me, but toward the end of my stay, I received word from someone who was still in touch with him. He had indeed heard the reports of my return and had been angry that no one in the family had contacted him. He had recently been unwell and wanted to see me. The message captured my dilemma almost perfectly—despite the unsympathetic tone, I couldn’t entirely harden my heart against him in his illness. However, there wasn’t time to go to Bhopal, let alone raise the question with the family and seek their blessing. It was something I would have to let go for the time being.

  Someone I had been eager to meet for a long time was Rochak, a local lawyer in his twenties who was the administrator of the Facebook group “Khandwa: My Home Town.” He visited me at the hotel and it was nice to finally put a face to the name. His Facebook group had been crucial in confirming that I had found the right place. Rochak had also helped me work out the best way to travel to Khandwa from where I sat at my computer in Hobart. Facebook had helped lead me back to my family as much as Google Earth had.

  I was pleased to be able to thank Rochak in person. He was genuinely delighted at the role he and his Facebook friends had played in my story, confirming details like the location of the fountain and cinema near Khandwa Station (once he had realized the cinema I was referring to had closed down). Unfortunately, he forgot at the time to send me some photos to confirm it, and I hadn’t pressed him. Now Rochak said he realized he could have been more helpful ha
d he known why I was asking, but I’d been nervous and coy about telling anyone what I was up to.

  Rochak was out of town when the story of my homecoming broke, but he quickly worked out what had happened when he came back to find that his Khandwa Facebook group suddenly had 150 new members, half of whom not only didn’t live in Khandwa but weren’t even Indians.

  He liked the way the Internet was putting people in far-flung regional places like Khandwa in touch with others around the world, as it was expanding people’s horizons and helping them build relationships that once would have been impossible. Some people deride Facebook relationships and say you should get real friends in the real world. Rochak helped me online in the most profound way—surely there is no better basis for friendship.

  Before he left, Rochak reminded me of the Hindu saying “Everything is written”: destiny takes its inevitable path.

  He thought my finding my home and family was a fulfillment of destiny, as was his helping me. Rochak had also helped me in one final way, by organizing a car and driver to take me on the hour-and-a-half trip to Burhanpur, where I was to stay the night before embarking on a journey with painful memories.

  I had a train to catch.

  13.

  Returning

  There was one more thing I felt I had to do before I could put to rest some of the ghosts of my past. I wanted to go back to Kolkata as an adult, and to get there I would take a train from Burhanpur, just as I’d done as an imprisoned, panicked five-year- old, and see what memories it brought back.

  In India, there is no such thing as simply making a rail booking. With the immense pressure on limited seats, a booking has to be certified beyond any possible challenge to ensure that when you get on the train there is no one already sitting in your seat and that it is yours for the entire journey. This is made all the more difficult when you don’t really know where you’re going—even as an adult, I needed some help to work out what train it might have been that took me across the country.

  I had first met Swarnima at the Khandwa station, having just abandoned a long queue at the ticket window when I realized that being unable to speak Hindi was going to make this trip even more difficult than it already promised to be. I had been feeling a bit defeated by the whole process, so her help was invaluable. Trains only go northeast or southwest out of Burhanpur, and together we worked out that both directions provided a possible route to Kolkata—one involved going south to Bhusawal, a more significant rail hub, from which there was a line heading roughly east across the country, and the other meant heading northeast before eventually arcing southeast toward the West Bengal capital. The northerly journey could be made without changing trains.

  When I was being shown the two routes I might have taken twenty-five years earlier, I had to face up to the uncertainty of my memories of that time. Clearly, I had been wrong about one important detail. I had always thought I had woken up on the train and arrived in Kolkata later the same day, having traveled roughly twelve to fifteen hours. That was what I’d always told everyone, and indeed, it was the basis for a lot of my searching on Google. But there was simply no way to get from Burhanpur to Kolkata in that time. It’s a 1,680-kilometer rail journey on the northerly route, and only a hundred kilometers less to go east via Bhusawal. The trip can take up to twenty-nine hours. I knew I got on the train in Burhanpur during the night, so I must have spent an additional night in transit. Maybe I slept through the entire second night. Or perhaps, as a terrified five-year-old, waking and sleeping between fits of panic and crying, I just lost track of time altogether. Either way, it was clearly a longer journey than I had remembered.

  This explained why my meticulous searching of Google Earth was fruitless for so long. Not only did I spend a long time looking in the wrong areas of the country, but even when I was looking west, the rough boundary I had calculated based on how far I might have gone in my imagined time frame was much too close to Kolkata. I only found Burhanpur in the end by taking an incredibly fortuitous look outside my search boundary. Might I have found it more quickly if I’d got the time right? Perhaps, but perhaps not— as I’d decided that the only reliable method was to follow train lines out from Kolkata, I still would have spent a long time examining them, and I would have had to trace them further. I suppose once I’d exhausted my search zone, I would have widened it and kept going.

  As I wondered which of the two routes I should book a seat on, another long-held assumption was challenged. I had always been certain that after Guddu and I had jumped off our train, I had slept on a bench, woken up to find a train in front of me, and boarded it, all without moving from the platform. As we’d traveled south from Khandwa to Burhanpur, any train on the same line would almost certainly have also been heading south, and you can’t get to Kolkata that way without changing trains. I had to concede that either I was wrong about not moving from the platform where Guddu left me—in which case I might well have boarded a northbound train and been spirited directly to Kolkata—or I went south and at some point indeed changed trains.

  As I’ve mentioned, my memories of that frightful night are not entirely clear, and sometimes I feel there are things I’ve only dimly remembered. Occasionally, I get flashes of them—so although my most prominent memory is that once I was on the train I was unable to escape it, I do have a disjointed, fragmentary image of the train at a station and my getting off it and jumping on another train. This is a flicker in the back of my mind, quite separate from my memories of the train ride, and I’m uncertain of it. But could it mean I initially made the trip south and then—because the train ended its service or I realized I was heading the wrong way—I switched trains to try to get back? It was possible, and that meant I might have reached Bhusawal and accidentally boarded an eastbound service to Kolkata.

  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.