A Long Way Home: Prologue–Chapter 2

I scrabble around in my daypack and pull out a page with color photographs of me as a child.

A man who has noticed us approaches, so I start my mantra over again, reciting the names of my mother, Kamla; my brothers, Guddu and Kallu; my sister, Shekila; and me, Saroo.

Long before I could read them, I knew that the immense V of the Indian subcontinent was a place teeming with cities and towns, with deserts and mountains, rivers and forests—the Ganges, the Himalayas, tigers, gods!—and it came to fascinate me.

I remember Mum and Dad taking me to see the Hindi film Salaam Bombay! Its images of the little boy trying to survive alone in a sprawling city, in the hope of returning to his mother, brought back disturbing memories so sharply that I wept in the dark cinema.

Even sad music of any kind (though particularly classical) could set off emotional memories, since in India I had often heard music emanating from other people’s radios.

It was very simple but certainly no chawl—those warrens of slums where the unfortunate families of the megacities like Mumbai and Delhi find themselves living.

Her hands and face were tattooed, as was the custom, and most of the time she wore a red sari.

I remember seeing my mother coming toward me from the outdoor ticket booth, her image hazy in the wavering heat emanating from the tarmac.

We children gravitated toward our mother, wondering what would happen with all the shouting and jostling.

She may have felt that we would fare better there, since the neighborhood was a little less destitute.

She may have felt that we would fare better there, since the neighborhood was a little less destitute.

For whatever reason, it was done without anesthetic, so it’s unsurprisingly one of my clearest and earliest memories.

I cried out and tried to struggle, but they held me fast as the man deftly sliced. It was very painful but over in seconds. He bandaged me up, and my mother carried me out and took care of me on a bed.

He was known to local police—as were Kallu and I, and many other young boys in our neighborhood—as a chancer, maybe a petty thief.

Somehow we managed to eke out a subsistence, living day to day and hand to mouth.

There was no choice in the matter; hunger was simply a fact of life, like the searing heat and the constantly buzzing flies.

We would roam aimlessly about the neighborhood like vagabonds, hoping to come across a party where there might be some leftovers, or an unwatched vegetable patch or fruit tree.

I didn’t get punished, probably because my mother realized how ravenous I was.

My nose was very sensitive to the scent of food since I was hungry just about all of the time, and one morning it led me to an intoxicating spicy smell emanating from our landlady’s kitchen.

The supervisor was very kind and took an avuncular interest in me, asking me what I’d been doing the day before and teaching me how to whistle.

Shekila was so tiny and beautiful. She had short, curly hair and was usually dressed in a dirty white frock.

When she was two, Shekila discovered an unusual and unhealthy way to appease her constant hunger pangs.

At times I caught her eating charcoal from our fireplace. She would hide small chunks of it in the hem of her dress and furtively gnaw on it, her face blackened by the dust.

We conducted some exciting kite dogfights, for which we would stick crushed glass to our kite’s string, giving it an abrasive cutting edge.

As I got a bit older, I was given more leeway outside the house and was allowed to start playing farther away.

One memorable day a helicopter landed near the field of the nearby military school, and everyone ran over to see what was going on. I didn’t know what it was, but I was intrigued by the fact that something that big could fly.

Once during my rambles I got lucky: a shop owner asked if I could peel the potatoes for pani puri, which is a puffed, crisp, savory treat that is fried, submerged in cold spiced water, and then eaten.

They were mostly living off their wits, scouring the streets for whatever they could find to subsist on and sleeping nights in railway stations, where they sometimes earned food or money for sweeping.

I was still half-asleep and I remember being unnerved by finding myself at the station alone at night. My thoughts were muddled.

I was still half-asleep and I remember being unnerved by finding myself at the station alone at night. My thoughts were muddled.

I can still feel the icy chill of panic that hit me when I realized that I was trapped—at once a feeling of weakness, hyperactivity, and incredulity.

The towns got bigger and closer together, and then there were no more fields, no more open country, just more and more houses—streets and streets of them—roads and cars and rickshaws.

I suppose the advantage of being a naive five was that I didn’t think too much about what had happened to the other children, or what it meant, other than that I wanted to avoid it.

But being lost in the big train station in this unsettlingly huge city had stifled that instinct—I ached for the familiar streets of home.

These men were barefoot and wore saffron robes and beads, and some of them were quite scary looking, with wild clumps of dirty long hair wound on their heads and red and white paint on their faces.