He didn’t know it at the time, but he had ended up in Calcutta’s main train station, and in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Bengali is the dominant language. Saroo saw what seemed to be a sea of homeless men, women, and children. With night falling, he rode back to the busy train station. Saroo eventually climbed onto another train, hoping it might lead him home, but it led him to another strange town. “They ignored me because they couldn’t understand me,” he recalled. Desperately, he ran up to strangers pleading for help, but no one spoke Hindi. ![]() He couldn’t read the signs on the platform. The five-year-old – who had never ventured unaccompanied beyond his small town – was now wandering alone through a bustling train station. Saroo had to wait a few more hours before the train arrived at the next stop. “It was a lot like being in a prison, a captive,” he recalled, “and I was just crying and crying.” He had no food, no money, and no idea how far he had gone or was going. Unable to move to another carriage while the train was in motion, Saroo ran back and forth through the car, calling for his brother, to no avail. “Bhaiya!” Saroo screamed, the Hindi word for brother. There was no one else in the carriage, and, outside, the blurred grasslands were unrecognisable. Saroo had no idea how long he’d been asleep. When he woke, sunlight was streaming through the windows and the train was moving quickly through the countryside. There were only a few people in the carriage, but Saroo figured his brother would find him soon enough, so he settled back to sleep. Groggy and dazed, he wandered onto a waiting passenger train, assuming that Guddu must have been waiting for him inside. Don’t go anywhere.” But when Saroo woke up later that night, his brother was gone. “I’m just going to go off and do something,” Guddu told him. Guddu took his hand and led him to a bench. Though he only found peanut shells, Saroo was happy just to be with his favourite brother.īy the time they hopped off the train at Burhanpur, Saroo felt exhausted and told his brother he needed to nap before they caught the next train back. The two got on a train to Burhanpur, about two hours away, and began scouring the floorboards for money as the train pulled away. ![]() Saroo rode for 30 minutes on the back of his brother’s rickety bicycle. But he was home.Įarly one evening, not long after, Guddu agreed to take his little brother to the railway station to search the compartments for change. He was out of breath and nearly out of eggs, so many had cracked and oozed through his shirt. He retraced the journey – through the dusty streets, turning past the cows and the cars, a right here near the fountain, a left there by the dam – until he stood panting at his doorstep. ![]() But he had a keen sense of direction and paid attention to his surroundings. He didn’t know the name of the town he lived in or his family’s surname. As the boys made their way out of the coop – holding their shirts like hammocks, full of eggs – two security guards came after them, and they were separated. One day, Guddu took little Saroo on a road he’d never seen before, to a factory where Guddu had heard that they might be able to steal eggs. Guddu, then aged nine, had assumed his role as the man of the house and spent his days searching passenger trains for fallen coins. His father had abandoned the family two years earlier. He lived there with his mother, Kamala, who worked long hours carrying bricks and cement, two older brothers, Guddu and Kullu, and a younger sister, Shekila. When night fell, he would walk three kilometres home to a tiny mud-brick house with a tin roof. He played barefoot under the downpour as trains passed nearby. IT was just a small river flowing over a dam wall, but to five-year-old Saroo Munshi Khan it felt like a waterfall.
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