Those vague recollections, of a fountain near the train tracks and a water tower, helped him finally chance upon his home during his online quest. Thus began his new life, in which Sheru became Saroo (a mispronunciation of his given name).īrierley has always spoken fondly about the years he spent growing up in Australia, learning English and going on to study business and hospitality – though his former life was never far from his thoughts and he became infatuat ed with searching satellite images on Google Earth, spending hours at a time painstakingly scouring railway lines across the country, with only faint memories as guidance. ![]() It was there that he was adopted by Sue and John Brierley from Hobart, in Australia’s southern island of Tasmania. Unbeknown to him, Guddu had been hit and killed by an oncoming train.īeing unable to communicate his plight with anyone in Bengali-speaking Kolkata, Brierley survived on the street until he was reported to local police as a lost child and eventually placed in the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption. But Guddu never returned, and when Brierley went off in search of him, he ended up falling asleep on a train that inadvertently sped him 1,500 kilometres across unfamiliar countryside to Kolkata. At the station, Brierley was under strict instruction to stay put and await his brother's return. When he was five, Brierley followed his brother Guddu on the train to the city of Burhanpur, 70 kilometres away. When even her meagre salary wasn't enough, the children took to begging at railway stations. His father left when he and his three siblings were young, throwing the family into bitter poverty and leaving his mother to work for long stretches of time at a construction site to provide for the family. Courtesy Four Communicationsīrierley was born Sheru Munshi Khan in Ganesh Talai, a suburb in the town of Khandwa in India's Madhya Pradesh province. It sent the already well-known story into the stratosphere.īrierley with Sunny Pawar, who played him as a child in the film, and Dev Patel. Lion, the film adaptation of Brierley's memoir, was released in 2016 to critical acclaim and garnered six Oscar nominations. It shot Sunny Pawar (a young boy from a Mumbai slum, who played young Saroo) to fame. You probably know Brierley's story – Dev Patel almost won an Oscar for it. This sequel seems eerily similar to a journey he took the world on just a few years earlier a delayed echo of his first grand trip from India to Australia to trace his heritage. It’s an individual thing that you do by yourself, there’s a lot of soul searching.” I know where he is, but I just haven’t had the strength to finalise that point. What he is certain of, however, is how his story will end. “It will finish off with finding my father. The guest of honour this year is India, which is particularly poignant for Brierley. The impending additions to his o euvre have not yet been officially announced, so he is understandably coy with the finer details. Saroo Brierly, far right, with his birth and adoptive mothers in his hometown in India. Courtesy Saroo Brierleyīrierley, now 37, is in the capital this week for the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, alongside other renowned authors flocking in from across the globe, such as Ben Okri and Ziauddin Yousafzai, the father of Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai. Oh, and there’s one more thing: his story is also being developed into a stage show. The sentence is rattled off, just like that, as if each of its components aren’t huge, lifelong achievements for most people. "It will be the sequel, and Mum's writing the prequel." ![]() "I'm writing another book," he tells The National. T he last chapter of Saroo Brierley's life is perhaps the only portion that the general public aren't yet privy to. After all, the first 31 years went out for public consumption when he penned his tell-all memoir A Long Way Home in 2013, and when British actor Dev Patel took his story not only to the big screen, but to the Academy Awards, too.īut what of everything that came after the happy ending? Well, that thirst to know what has become of Brierley – the Indian child who got lost so far from home that he wound up reh oused in Tasmania, only to go in search of his real mother two decades later with only a faint memory and Google Earth as guidance – can now be satiated.
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