A Long Way Home: Chapter 12–Epilogue

I’m a salesman for industrial pipes, hoses, and fittings; I was looking for my hometown and my family—not the limelight!

Or at least they could partly access it—they didn’t have a video camera at their end, so I couldn’t see them, but they could see me and we could talk, either in our stilted way or through a translator.

Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, is invoked and praised, and families display their wealth before her image in their household shrine and give thanks for their good fortune.

My mother had told me I was always welcome to stay with her, but I knew she understood that I lived as a Westerner now and needed space and amenities her tiny flat couldn’t provide.

There is something about the balance of spices and the consistency of the meat—if goat is not cooked correctly, the fibrous meat sticks between your teeth—that she has down to perfection.

But I was aware that I had to tread carefully, because I didn’t want the issue of money to complicate or taint our new relationship.

My mother’s new work as a housecleaner earned her about 1,200 rupees a month—a much greater sum than she earned when I was little but still a pittance, even in the context of regional India.

They didn’t doubt he would have seen the publicity surrounding my return but were adamant they’d turn him away if he appeared, however contrite he was.

Now Rochak said he realized he could have been more helpful had he known why I was asking, but I’d been nervous and coy about telling anyone what I was up to.

Some people deride Facebook relationships and say you should get real friends in the real world.

This explained why my meticulous searching of Google Earth was fruitless for so long.

The train I decided I would take, then, was the Kolkata Mail, which had plied the same route in the eighties, when it was known as the Calcutta Mail.

Conductors are a regular presence on interstate trains, which is one of the reasons I couldn’t get far out of Kolkata when I was trying to find my way back: because I was avoiding conductors, I was probably unwittingly boarding only local trains.

I spent the evening in the courtyard restaurant of my hotel in Burhanpur, watching the last skyrockets of people’s Diwali festival stockpiles light up the sky.

I simply must have traveled south initially, even if I somehow came back through Burhanpur for the northern route. My head swam with all the possible permutations.

When I was a child, air travel in India was reserved for only the most important people: politicians, business moguls and their families, or Bollywood film stars.

Trains brought glimpses of the more affluent city life to our backwater town in the middle of rural India.

Trains brought glimpses of the more affluent city life to our backwater town in the middle of rural India.

Had they known how slow the trains were, it might have taken me longer to get around to searching farther afield.

We had traveled for just over an hour when I experienced a poignant moment. If it was this northeastern route I had been on as a child, I would have passed through my hometown, Khandwa.

In the background was what sounded like a compilation CD of many different styles of contemporary Hindi music, including jazz and even what seemed to be Hindi yodeling.

When I got off the train, I took a minute or two to simply stand in the middle of the busy station concourse and let the crowd rush by me, just as I did back then.

I’d begged in it, slept in and around it, and spent those weeks making futile train trips to try to get out of it.

Then I saw her, scrutinizing a computer monitor and surrounded by official-looking files in the cramped inner office, an old air conditioner stuck hazardously onto the wall above her—Mrs. Sood.

She gained some other influential patrons—the president of the All India Women’s Conference, and a renowned independence freedom fighter, Ashoka Gupta—and with their support registered ISSA in 1975.

She said that intercountry adoption was now managed by a central authority rather than directly through agencies like ISSA, but that measures designed to “streamline” procedures had instead made the process ever more complicated and lengthy.

I could feel her frustration, and I knew that Mum felt the same way—she had become a passionate advocate for making international adoption easier after going through the delays in adopting Mantosh and seeing how the extra time in adverse circumstances had affected him.

I was assessed and taken to Liluah, the juvenile home, where I was classified as a child in need of care.

It was a dingy, nondescript building, and I didn’t stay there long, on either visit.

It was a dingy, nondescript building, and I didn’t stay there long, on either visit.

As I stood there, I thought about the time outsiders had breached what looked like a fortress, and wondered how that could have happened without someone turning a blind eye.

No doubt there needed to be stricter controls in place to avoid such blights on the system.

When the idea of filming their introduction had been floated by 60 Minutes in Australia, to be featured as the centerpiece of a story about my experiences, I found myself once again apprehensive.

If I can help her with her mission to care for children who find themselves in situations similar to that which befell me, I will do everything I can.

I feel strongly that there is an element of destiny in these events, intertwining my two families, with me as the linchpin.

I might also have restricted my searches to train lines near a short list of “B” towns rather than pedantically tracing all routes out from Howrah Station to a roughly calculated perimeter, even if there was a juggernaut logic to my methods.

I might also have restricted my searches to train lines near a short list of “B” towns rather than pedantically tracing all routes out from Howrah Station to a roughly calculated perimeter, even if there was a juggernaut logic to my methods.

We all know what they say about hindsight.

I don’t have any regrets about how things transpired, with the exception of my brother’s tragic death.

While I don’t have any urge to convert that into religious belief, I feel strongly that from my being a little lost boy with no family to becoming a man with two, everything was meant to happen just the way it happened. And I am profoundly humbled by that thought.