By Saleem Mubarak
This is the story of an innocent boy whose life took a helpless and painful turn. His name is Saroo, and he’s only five years old.
He loves his mother deeply and dreams of seeing her again. He lives with his mother and siblings in a small Indian village called Kandu, in a broken-down one-room hut.
A Struggle Against Poverty
Their home shows the face of poverty. His mother puts all her energy into raising her children. But she’s alone and struggles to bear life’s hardships. She tries her best for her kids, but poverty pulls the ground from under their feet.
A Tragic Night at the Train Station
One night, Saroo goes to the nearby train station with his older brother. They look for leftover food and some money to ease their hunger.
The journey tires Saroo out, and when they reach the station, sleep fills his eyes. His big brother worries about Saroo and kindly tells him to lie down on the bench and rest a bit. He says he’ll go find food scraps and come back soon.
Saroo lies on the bench and quickly falls asleep from tiredness. But fate can be so cruel to this innocent child, you can’t even imagine.
Here’s what happens: The older brother was busy looking for scraps near the train tracks when a fast-moving train suddenly crushed him. In a moment, everything ended. The older brother, who was the support for his mother and Saroo, left this world.
Lost and Alone
On the other hand, Saroo slept peacefully on the bench. He had no idea his world had fallen apart. Some time later, when he wakes up, he’s surprised not to find his big brother. He looks around and starts calling out for his brother again and again, but gets no answer.
His heart starts beating fast, and fear fills his eyes. Seeing a train standing on the platform, a spark of hope lights up in Saroo’s heart. He thinks maybe his big brother is on that train.
A New Journey Begins
Saroo runs and climbs onto the train. He races through it wildly, calling out for his big brother over and over. He asks people for help, but no one understands his pain.
Finally, tired and defeated, he sits on a seat. He holds hope in his heart that maybe his big brother will come back. But tiredness takes over his body, and he falls into deep sleep again.
While Saroo was sleeping, the train slowly started moving. When he wakes up, he’s shocked and scared to find that 14 hours have passed. The train has reached Kolkata, a city thousands of miles from Kandu, full of noise and crowds.
Surviving on the Streets of Kolkata
When he gets off the train, a wave of uncertainty and panic runs through his heart. Everywhere he sees strange faces, noisy people, and trains leaving in different directions, confusing him more. He doesn’t know where he is or what to do. The people around him don’t speak his language, and he feels alone and helpless.
Kolkata’s harsh streets prove very scary for this little boy, but Saroo’s smarts and will to survive help keep him alive. He quickly understands that to stay alive, he must keep looking for leftover food scraps and some money.
For many weeks, he lives like this among cold, hunger, and fear, but a small light of hope brings brightness to his life.
A Ray of Hope
One day, Saroo meets a kind woman we’ll call Gita. Gita is a ray of light for children forced to live on the streets. She runs a local orphanage and gives shelter to helpless children on the streets.
When Gita hears Saroo’s story, she’s moved by his situation and takes him in. At the orphanage, she gives him a safe place to stay. She provides him with a bed so he can sleep peacefully, and she also makes sure he has food to eat so he never goes to bed hungry.
A New Family
But there’s a big problem: Gita can’t send him back to his village or family because Saroo himself doesn’t know where he came from.
He’s just a five-year-old innocent boy who doesn’t clearly know about his village or home. When Gita realizes she can’t find Saroo’s family, she decides to find a new family for him.
The time comes for Saroo’s luck to change. When he turns six, a loving Australian couple adopts him. The woman’s name is Sue, and her husband’s name is John.
Their kindness and love bring new hope and happiness to Saroo’s life. They take Saroo from Kolkata to Australia, where they give him a chance to start a new life. This couple proves to be perfect parents for Su. They give him endless love, take care of him at every step, and provide him with a safe and happy life.
The Unbreakable Bond with His Mother
Saroo loves them deeply, but in his heart, he still longs for his real mother and siblings. Saroo can never forget his mother and that hut where he spent his childhood with his siblings. Their memories echo in his heart every moment.
He doesn’t know if he’ll ever see them again, or if this will just remain an unfinished dream. Many years pass, and Saroo’s life in Australia moves on peacefully, but his heart always gives him jolts about his family.
Now Saroo is twenty years old. One day, his friend shows him Google Earth and tells him how amazing and detailed its maps are. A spark of hope lights up in Saroo’s heart. He thinks maybe this is the way he can find his village and his mother. This thought leads him on a new journey.
But there was a huge obstacle: India is a vast country with a population of 1.4 billion people. For Saroo, finding his family like this was like looking for a needle in a haystack. But Saroo wasn’t one to give up. He made his search the mission of his life.
Every night after work, he spent hours searching railway routes on Google Earth. He looked at all the routes coming and going from Kolkata again and again. He tried to piece together the hazy memories of his childhood because his determination was unshakeable.
An Unbelievable Discovery
After six years of tireless work and searching, one night while he was looking at a map of an ordinary railway track, he suddenly saw some scenes that look very familiar to him.
A water tower, a bridge, and a view near a dam refresh the faint memories of childhood in his mind. He excitedly says to himself, “This is the place where I spent my childhood. This is where my family lived.”
The only way to fully identify this area was to go there himself. After thinking it over, Saroo quickly decided to go to this place. He books a plane ticket and flies from Australia to Kandu.
When he reaches his village, his heart starts beating fast. He walks on the streets where he had stepped countless times in his childhood.
Finally, he reaches a path that leads him to his family’s hut. But when he gets there, his heart sinks. The hut where he had spent precious years of his life with his family was no longer there.
In its place was now just a pile of rubble that had fallen victim to the merciless hands of time.
In this moment of disappointment, fate once again becomes kind to him, and he meets a local person. This person turns out to be their old neighbor. Saroo meets him and tells his story. He also shows the old man a childhood picture of himself.
The neighbor, seeing the picture, immediately tells him that he can take him to his mother.
Mother and Son Reunited
The old man starts guiding Saroo and takes him to a nearby street corner where Saroo’s eyes fall on an old woman. That woman was none other than Saroo’s mother. This was the moment when Su was seeing his mother after 25 years of long separation. Now mother and son were standing face to face.
Both of their emotions get out of control, and between them, if there was anything, it was only tears, joy, and an expression of love. They immediately hug each other tightly. It was a moment where words had no place.
Since this meeting, Saroo has strengthened his relationship with his mother. He writes her letters regularly and visits her whenever he gets the chance.
He bought a beautiful house for his mother so she can live her life in comfort and peace and never have to face any hardship again.
