Movie About an Indian Man's Journey to Reunite With Family
Every year, Saroo Brierley celebrates his birthday on May 22. Just that wasn't the mean solar day he was born. It was the day he was found.
As a 5-year-onetime male child growing upward in rural Bharat, Brierley would ofttimes bring together his older brother as they scrounged for coins and food on trains to help their impoverished mother and siblings. One twenty-four hour period in 1986, Brierley savage asleep inside an empty train stationed a few stops away from their hometown while waiting for his brother to fetch him. When he awoke hours later, he was hundreds of miles abroad, careening on an out-of-service railroad train eventually headed for Calcutta.
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"The panic ready in," Brierley tells PEOPLE of waking up to discover himself hungry, locked inside and hurtling toward an unknown destination. "I was crying for my mom and my brother and my sister."
Bierley would spend several terrifying weeks surviving on the streets of Calcutta before somewhen being placed in an orphanage and adopted past an Australian couple. He'd go on to relate the ordeal in his memoir A Long Journeying Habitation — and his story is now the bailiwick of the new motion picture Panthera leo, starring Dev Patel as Brierley and Nicole Kidman equally his adoptive mom, Sue.
Even more than astonishing, Brierley'due south journey would accept him full circle: More than 2 decades later on he was torn from his Indian family, Brierley would reunite with his birth female parent following a painstaking search for a hometown he barely remembered, using Google Earth.
Now 35, Brierley, who lives in Hobart, Tasmania, with his adoptive parents, can still remember that pivotal day in his Indian hometown before his life was forever derailed — from its "dusty aroma" to "the screeching of brakes, the people shouting and the pitter-patter of feet."
Credit: Courtesy The Weinstein Visitor
Beingness unprooted to Calcutta, notwithstanding, plunged him into chaos. He subsisted by eating discarded food and drinking from faucets. At 1 point, he fled from a gang who abducted street children. "There'due south no salvation at all," he says. "The simply matter yous could practise is just try and survive a twenty-four hours at a fourth dimension."
For a while, Brierley was taken in past a local teenager and his family, earlier he was brought to authorities and processed at a precinct on May 22, 1987 — the day they designated equally his birthday in official papers. Young Brierley, a Hindi speaker who didn't understand Calcutta's Bengali dialect, didn't even know the day he was born.
His adoption past Sue and John Brierley provided conservancy for the lost kid. "Saroo's arrival was a kind of nascency into our family," Sue tells PEOPLE of offset meeting their son at an airport in Tasmania. "It was just a fantastic moment, filled with love and joy." They handed him some chocolates, a volume and a stuffed koala toy. Brierley afterward named it Koala Dundee.
"It didn't take united states of america long to realize he had come up from a good family," John says, "with love around him."
Brierley grew up in a happy dwelling a stone's throw away from the beach, and his parents later adopted another boy from Republic of india. Merely Brierley remained haunted by his turbulent, mysterious past. And then when he discovered Google Earth, which provides aerial views of the planet, he saw it equally a gamble to track down his nascency family.
Over five years, he embarked on an "obsessive" search, tracing a spiderweb'due south worth of train tracks, all spiraling out from the city now known equally Kolkata. And then 1 twenty-four hours, he came upon something: a water tower he recognized. "Was this reality? Am I dreaming?" he wondered.
From there, puzzle pieces — blurred but familiar — slowly cruel into place. A train-station platform. A pedestrian bridge. A ravine. It was the topography of a lost youth.
"It was a surreal moment," he explains of his discovery. "Within, I was jumping with joy."
In February 2012, Brierley traveled to the central Indian city of Khandwa, fueled by the support of his adoptive parents. "If he wanted to explore that," says Sue, "we wanted him to be fully happy about his identity."
Every bit he wandered through Khandwa, Brierley slowly retraced roads and pathways that began to snap into focus, following them until they led him to a familiar, dusty place filled with the sounds of screeching brakes, people shouting and the pitter-patter of feet: his hometown.
There, villagers took him to an elderly woman who looked back in shock. Surrounded by townsfolk, she stepped frontwards, knowingly reached out, and touched her son. Brierley and his nativity mother, Fatima, hugged tightly through tears. "It was the most pivotal moment of my life," he says.
A year later, Sue, accompanied by Brierley, traveled to Khandwa to run into the woman with whom she now shared a fateful bond. With the help of a translator, the three came together.
"The earth seemed to be sort of moving," Sue says of that moment. "I started to weep, and she hugged me. She said through the translator, 'He's your son now. I requite my son to you.' Nosotros stood there for quite a while, only the three of united states holding each other. Suddenly there was no noise. There was simply our breathing."
Brierley has since returned more than a dozen times to India to visit Fatima, whom he bought a business firm for.
"He's so lovely," Dev Patel says of Brierley. "Nosotros met in Australia, and he is so generous. Saroo'due south the epitome of just a fiercely driven beau. And he has an incredible memory, down to the eggs I ordered at that meal, the clothes I was wearing, everything. He remembers crystal-clear."
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Indeed, Brierley holds on to things tightly: Near 30 years after he first arrived in Commonwealth of australia, he still has that stuffed koala toy that his parents gave him at the airport. Gray, with bulging eyes that pop out of their sockets, information technology'south kept in a bedroom at his parents' house.
"He was the teddy bear that I could agree on to when I was having my dreams of fear, zooming dorsum to the scary times in Calcutta," says Brierley, who hopes that his story volition be a beacon to others. "For people who have been in similar situations, wandering and yearning to find their loved ones, their family or any it may exist — I hope that this picture empowers them," he offers.
Those shut to him, for their part, are keeping a vow of their own. Says Sue, "At that place was no way we were going to let him get lost again."
Source: https://people.com/movies/lion-movie-true-story-saroo-brierley/
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