The man who fell from Google Earth

Saroo Brierley spent long hours scanning Google Earth, sometimes staying up till 4am, looking for his home village.  Source:  Supplied

  

Saroo reunited with his mother.  Source:  AP

When night fell, he would walk three kilometres home to a tiny mud-brick house with a tin roof. 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. His father had abandoned the family two years earlier. Guddu, then aged nine, had assumed his role as the man of the house and spent his days searching passenger trains for fallen coins. Sometimes he didn’t return for days. 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. 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. Saroo was illiterate. He couldn’t count to 10. He didn’t know the name of the town he lived in or his family’s surname. But he had a keen sense of direction and paid attention to his surroundings. 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. He was out of breath and nearly out of eggs, so many had cracked and oozed through his shirt. But he was home.

By 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. Guddu took his hand and led him to a bench. “I’m just going to go off and do something,” Guddu told him. “Stay here. Don’t go anywhere.” But when Saroo woke up later that night, his brother was gone. Groggy and dazed, he wandered onto a waiting passenger train, assuming that Guddu must have been waiting for him inside. 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.

When he woke, sunlight was streaming through the windows and the train was moving quickly through the countryside. Saroo had no idea how long he’d been asleep. There was no one else in the carriage, and, outside, the blurred grasslands were unrecognisable. “Bhaiya!” Saroo screamed, the Hindi word for brother. “Guddu!” But there was no response. 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. He had no food, no money, and no idea how far he had gone or was going. “It was a lot like being in a prison, a captive,” he recalled, “and I was just crying and crying.”

Saroo had to wait a few more hours before the train arrived at the next stop. The five-year-old – who had never ventured unaccompanied beyond his small town – was now wandering alone through a bustling train station. He couldn’t read the signs on the platform. Desperately, he ran up to strangers pleading for help, but no one spoke Hindi. “They ignored me because they couldn’t understand me,” he recalled. Saroo eventually climbed onto another train, hoping it might lead him home, but it led him to another strange town. With night falling, he rode back to the busy train station. Saroo saw what seemed to be a sea of homeless men, women, and children. He passed corpses as well. 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. Fearful and confused, Saroo curled up under a row of seats and went to sleep.

For the next week or so, Saroo travelled in and out of Calcutta by train, hoping to end up back at his hometown – but only found himself in other strange places he didn’t know or recognise. He subsisted on whatever he could beg from strangers or find in the trash. Finally, after one last fruitless trip, Saroo gave up and stepped back into the Calcutta train station, his new home. He continued living on the streets for a few weeks when a kind man who spoke a little Hindi took pity on him and gave him shelter for three days. Unsure of what to do next, he took Saroo to a local prison, thinking that he’d be safest there. The next day Saroo was transferred to a juvenile home – a common endpoint for vagrant and criminal youth.

The Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption, a non-profit child-welfare group, paid regular visits to the home looking for children fit for adoption. Saroo was deemed a good candidate, and after no one responded to his description and photo in a missing-children bulletin, he was added to the adoption list. Transferred to an orphanage, Saroo was cleaned up and taught how to eat with a knife and fork instead of his hands so that he’d be better suited for Western parents. Then one day he was handed a little red photo album. “This is your new family,” he was told. “They will love you, and they will take care of you.”

Saroo flipped through the album. There was a photo of a smiling white couple; the woman had red curly hair, and the man, slightly balding, wore a sports coat and tie. He saw a photo of a red-brick home with the same man waving on the front porch. An administrator translated the text accompanying each photo. “This is the house that will be your home, and how your father will welcome you home,” read a caption under the picture. Saroo flipped the page and saw a postcard of a Qantas airplane. “This plane will take you to Australia,” read the caption.

Saroo had never heard of Australia. But in his six months away from home, he had come to realise that he couldn’t find his way back after all. “Here’s a new opportunity,” he recalled thinking. “Am I willing to accept it or not? And I said to myself, ‘I’ll accept this, and I’ll accept them as my new family’.”

John and Sue Brierley were an earnest couple  from Hobart in Tasmania with charitable ideals who, though they were probably biologically capable of bearing children, chose to adopt a lost Indian child as a way of giving back to the world. “There are so many kids around that need a home,” John said, “so we thought, ‘Well, this is what we will do’.”

The Brierleys had started their own company around the time that Saroo joined them. They also owned a boat and would take their new son sailing and swimming. Saroo would return to their air-conditioned house – his bedroom with a stuffed koala, a sailboat bedspread, and a map of India on the wall – as if he were living someone else’s life. “I kept on looking over to them to make sure this is all real,” he recalled, “to make sure, you know, that they’re here and this is not a dream.”

Despite the shock of the new lifestyle, Saroo adjusted, picking up the language as well as an Aussie accent. Though there were few Indians in Tasmania, he grew into a popular teenager; he was athletic and always had a girlfriend. His family expanded when his parents adopted another boy from India five years later. But, privately, Saroo was haunted by the mystery of his past. “Even though I was with people I trusted, my new family, I still wanted to know how my family is: will I ever see them again? Is my brother still alive? Can I see my mother’s face once again? I would go to sleep and a picture of my mum would come in my head.”

In 2009, having graduated from college, Saroo was living with a friend in the centre of Hobart and working on the website for his parents’ company. Recovering from an ugly breakup, he was drinking and partying more than usual. After years of ignoring his past, it finally came crashing back – the desire to find his roots, and himself. That’s when he went to his laptop and launched Google Earth, the virtual globe made from satellite imagery and aerial photography. With a few clicks, anyone could get a bird’s-eye view of cities and streets on the computer screen. “I was flying over India on Google Earth just like Superman,” he recalled. As the tiny trees and trains blurred on his screen, he paused and wondered – could he find his home using Google Earth? It seemed like a crazy idea: he didn’t have even a vague notion of where in the vast country he’d lived. But he was going to try.

Where to start, though? He tried looking for the city where he’d fallen asleep on the train, but he no longer remembered any Hindi, and the names on the map swam before him: Brahmapur, Badarpur, Baruipur, Bharatpur – a seemingly endless string of similar-sounding names. He could muster only a few landmarks to look for: the train station, the dam that flowed like a waterfall after the monsoons, and the fountain where he had once scarred his leg while climbing over a fence. He also remembered seeing a bridge and a large industrial tank near the more distant station where he was separated from his brother.

He began in the most logical way he could imagine: by following the train tracks out of Calcutta, to “find the breadcrumbs”, as he later put it, that would lead him back home. The tracks led away from the city like a spider web, crisscrossing the country. After weeks of fruitlessly following the tracks, Saroo would get frustrated and periodically give up the search.

Three years later, after meeting his new girlfriend, Lisa, Saroo became determined to pinpoint his birthplace. Rather than searching haphazardly, he realised, he needed to narrow down his range. Drawing from an applied-mathematics course he had taken in college, Saroo reconceived the problem like a question on a standardised test. If he had fallen asleep on the train in the early evening and arrived the next morning in Calcutta, 12 hours had probably passed. If he knew how fast his train was going, he could determine the rough distance he had travelled – and search Google Earth locations within that area.

Saroo used Facebook and MySpace to contact four Indian friends he knew from college. He asked them to ask their parents how fast trains travelled in India in the mid-1980s. Saroo took the average speed, 80km/h, and determined that he must have boarded the train roughly 960km from Calcutta. With the satellite image of India on his screen, he opened an editing program and began slowly drawing a circle with a radius of 960km with Calcutta at its centre, creating a rough line around which to search. Then he realised he could narrow it down even further, eliminating the regions that didn’t speak Hindi and those with cold climates. He had been told that his facial structure resembled people from east India, so he decided to focus largely on that part of the circle.

But there were still dozens of twisting tracks to follow, and Saroo began spending hours a night on the trail. He’d search India on Google Earth for as much as six hours at a time, sometimes until 4am. One night, Saroo finally saw something familiar: a bridge next to a large industrial tank by a train station. After months of researching, Saroo had lately been focusing on the other side of the radius, in the central west of India – “Somewhere I never thought to give much attention,” he later said. His heart racing, he read the name of the town: Burhanpur. “I had a shock,” he recalled. This was it, the name of the station where he was separated from his brother that day, a couple of hours from his home. Saroo scrolled up the train track looking for the next station. He flew over trees and rooftops, buildings and fields, until he came to the next depot, and his eyes fell on a river beside it – a river that flowed over a dam like a waterfall.

Saroo felt dizzy, but he wasn’t finished yet. He needed to prove to himself that this was really it. So he put himself back into the body of the barefoot five-year-old boy under the waterfall. “I said to myself, ‘Well, if you think this is the place, then I want you to prove to yourself that you can make your way back from where the dam is to the city centre’.”

Saroo moved his cursor over the streets on-screen: a left here, a right there, until he arrived at the heart of the town – and the satellite image of a fountain, the same fountain where he had scarred his leg 25 years before. Saroo stumbled to bed at 2am, too overwhelmed to continue or even look at the name of the town on his screen. He woke five hours later wondering if it had all been a dream. “I think I found my hometown,” he told his girlfriend Lisa, who groggily followed him to his computer.

The name of the town was Khandwa. Saroo went to YouTube, searching for videos of the town. He found one, and marvelled as he watched a train roll through the same station he’d departed from with his brother so long ago. Then he took to Facebook, where he found a group called “Khandwa My Home Town”. “Can anyone help me,” he typed, leaving a message for the group. “I think I’m from Khandwa. I haven’t seen or been back to the place for 24 years. Just wondering if there is a big fountain near the cinema?”

That night he logged back on to find a response from the page’s administrator. “Well we can’t tell you exactly…” the administrator replied. “There is a garden near the cinema but the fountain is not that much big… the cinema has been closed for years…” Encouraged, Saroo soon posted another question for the group. He had a faint memory of the name of his neighbourhood in Khandwa and wanted confirmation. “Can anyone tell me the name of the suburb on the top right hand side of Khandwa? I think it starts with G … not sure how you spell it, but I think it goes like this (Gunesttellay)? The town is Muslim one side and Hindus on the other which was 24 years ago but might be different now.”

“Ganesh Talai,” the administrator replied. Saroo posted one more message to the Facebook group. “Thank you!” he wrote. “That’s it!! What’s the quickest way to get to Khandwa if I was flying to India?”

On February 10, 2012, Saroo was looking  down on India again – not from Google Earth this time, but from a plane. The closer the trees below appeared, the more flashbacks of his youth popped into his mind. “I almost came to the point of tears because those flashes were so extreme,” he recalled.

Though his adoptive father, John, had encouraged Saroo to pursue his quest, his mother was concerned about what he might find. Sue feared that Saroo’s memories of how he went missing may not have been accurate. Perhaps his family had sent the boy away on purpose, so that they would have one less mouth to feed. “We knew that this happened quite a lot,” Sue later said, despite Saroo’s insistence that this couldn’t have been the case. “Saroo was quite definite about it,” she went on, “but we did wonder.”

For a moment at the airport, Saroo had been hesitant to board the plane. But this was a journey he had to complete, to find his biological mother and ask her: “Did you look for me?”

Tired and drained 20-odd hours later, he was in the back of a taxi pulling into Khandwa. It was a far cry from Hobart. The dusty street teemed with people in flowing dhotis and burkas. Feral dogs and pigs roamed near barefoot children. Saroo found himself at the Khandwa train station, the very platform where he had left with his brother, 25 years before.

The rest of the journey he would undertake on foot. Slinging his backpack over his shoulder, Saroo stood by the station and closed his eyes for a few moments, telling himself to find his path home. With every step, it felt like two films overlaying, his wispy memories from his childhood and the vital reality now. He passed the cafe where he used to work selling chai tea. He passed the fountain where he’d cut his leg, now run down and much smaller than he remembered. But despite the familiar landmarks, the town had changed enough that he began to doubt himself. At last, he found himself standing in front of a familiar mud-brick house with a tin roof. Saroo felt frozen as memories flickered before him like holograms. He saw himself as a child playing with his kite here during the day with his brother, sleeping outside to escape the heat of summer nights, curled up safely against his mother, looking up at the stars. He didn’t know how long he stood there, but eventually his reverie was broken by a short Indian woman. She held a baby and began speaking to him in a language he could no longer speak or understand.

“Saroo,” he said in his Aussie accent, pointing to himself. The town had rarely seen foreigners, and Saroo, dressed in a hoodie and Asics runners, seemed lost. He pointed to the house and recited the names of his family members. “Kamala,” he said. “Guddu. Kullu. Shekila.” He showed her the picture of himself as a boy, repeating his name. “These people don’t live here anymore,” she finally said in broken English.

Saroo’s heart sank. Oh my God, he thought, assuming they must be dead. Soon another curious neighbour wandered over, and Saroo repeated his list of names, showing him his picture. Nothing. Another man took the picture from him and examined it for a moment and told Saroo he would be right back.

A few minutes later, the man returned and handed it back to him. “I will take you now to your mother,” the man said. “It’s OK. Come with me.”

“I didn’t know what to believe,” Saroo remembers thinking. In a daze, he followed the man around the corner; a few seconds later, he found himself in front of a mud-brick house where three women in colourful robes stood. “This is your mother,” the man said.

Which one? Saroo wondered. Quickly he ran his eyes over the women, who seemed as numb with shock as he was. “I looked at one and I said, ‘No, it’s not you.'” Then he looked at another. It may be you, he thought – then reconsidered. Finally his eyes fell on the weathered woman in the middle. She wore a bright yellow robe with flowers, and her grey hair, which had been dyed with streaks of orange, was pulled back in a bun. Without saying anything, the woman stepped forward and hugged him. Saroo couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. Then his mother took him by the hand and led her son home.

Saroo’s mother went by a new name now, Fatima, a name she’d taken after converting to Islam. She lived alone in a tiny two-room house with an army cot, a gas stove, and a locked trunk for her belongings. She and her son didn’t share the same language, so they spent their time smiling at each other and nodding while Fatima phoned her friends with the amazing news. “The happiness in my heart was as deep as the sea,” Fatima later recalled. Soon a young woman with long black hair, a nose stud and a brown robe came in with tears in her eyes and threw her arms around him. The family resemblance was visible to everyone there. It was his younger sister, Shekila. Then came a man a few years older than Saroo: his brother Kullu. I can see the resemblance! Saroo thought.

He met his niece and nephews, his brother-in-law and sister-in-law, as more and more people crowded into the room. The entire time, his mother remained seated by him holding his hand. Despite the joy, there was scepticism. Some people asked Fatima, “How do you know this is your son?” Saroo’s mother pointed to the scar on his forehead where he had cut himself after being chased by a feral dog long ago. “I was the one who bandaged that up,” she said.

With the help of a friend who spoke English, Saroo told them of his incredible journey. Then he looked his mother in the eyes and asked her, “Did you look for me?” He listened as the woman translated his question, and then came the reply. “Of course,” she said. She had searched for years, following the train tracks leading out of town just as he had sought the ones leading back. Finally, she met a fortune teller who told her she would be reunited with her boy. With that, she found the strength to stop her quest and trust that, one day, she would see his face again.

Now, another question entered Saroo’s mind. Someone was missing, he realised – his eldest brother. “Where is Guddu?” he asked. His mother’s eyes welled up. “He is no longer,” she said.

“Heaven just fell on me when I heard that,” he recalled. His mother explained that about a month after Saroo had disappeared his brother was found on the train track, his body split in two. No one knew how it had happened. But just like that, in the span of a few weeks, his mother had lost two sons.

With her youngest son by her side again, Fatima prepared his favourite boyhood meal, curried goat. Together the family ate, soaking in this most impossible dream come true. In a text to his family back in Australia, Saroo wrote: “The questions I wanted answered have been answered. There are no more dead ends. My family is true and genuine, as we are in Australia. She has thanked you, mum and dad, for bringing me up. My brother and sister and mum understand fully that you and dad are my family, and they don’t want to intervene in any way. They are happy just knowing that I’m alive, and that’s all they want. I hope you know that you guys are first with me, which will never change. Love you.”

“Darling boy, what a miracle,” Sue wrote to Saroo. “We are happy for you. Take things carefully. We wish we were there with you to support. We can cope with anything for our children, as you have seen for 24 years. Love.”

Saroo remained in Khandwa for 11 days, seeing his family every day and enduring the rush of visitors coming to see the lost boy who had found his way home. As the time grew nearer for him to leave, it became clear that maintaining their new relationship would have its challenges. Fatima wanted her son close to home and tried to persuade Saroo to stay, but he told her that his life remained in Tasmania, where he helps to run the family industrial supplies business. When he promised to send $100 a month to cover her living expenses, she bristled at the idea of money substituted for proximity. But, after all these years apart, they were determined not to let such differences get in the way of their relationship; even saying “Hello” on the phone with each other would be more than either had ever imagined possible.

Before he left Khandwa, however, there was one more place to visit. One afternoon, he took a motorcycle ride with his brother Kullu. Seated behind him, Saroo pointed out the way that he remembered, a left here, a right there, until they stood at the foot of the river, near the dam that flowed like a waterfall.

Australian-UK production company See-Saw Films, which made the Oscar-winning movie The King’s Speech, has bought film rights to the upcoming autobiography of Saroo Brierley, to be published by Penguin.