Saru Brayerli

Saroo Brierley is an Australian businessman of Indian origin. He was separated from his birth mother and found her 25 years later. His story attracted public attention, especially in Australia and India. Brierley wrote an autobiographical book called A Long Way Home.

Saroo Brierley was born in 1981 in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh (Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh). Saroo’s family was very poor: his father left his mother when the boy was very young, and his mother worked herself to exhaustion at a construction site, trying to feed her children. Saroo started working early—already at the age of four he helped his older brothers work on the railway, cleaning and sweeping train cars. One day his older brother left Saroo, who was about five years old at the time, in a train car and told him to wait there. Saroo waited patiently and then fell asleep. When the boy woke up, the train car was empty and outside the window lay a huge unfamiliar city. Later Saroo learned that it was Kolkata, but at the time that would hardly have helped the frightened little boy. He still did not know that he was 1,500 km from home. Saroo made several attempts to return home—he reasoned that if the train had carried him away from home, it could also bring him back. But each time the local trains brought him back to Kolkata. For the first couple of weeks he lived right at the railway station—the hope of getting home did not leave the boy. He found food wherever he could, and later ended up in a children’s shelter, where he was officially listed as a lost child. That was how Saroo began living in the shelter. He did not know then that on that very day his older brother, after leaving him in the train car, had been hit by a train. His mother lost two sons on the same day, but one body was found, while the other son remained missing. Fate was kind to Saroo—the homeless and unhappy boy was soon adopted by an Australian couple surnamed Brierley. Thus the Indian boy Saroo ended up in Australia, in the city of Hobart (Hobart, Tasmania, Australia). Saroo Brierley grew up like an ordinary Australian boy, yet he never forgot that strange train that had taken him away from his familiar life,