The happiness in my heart was as deep as the sea.
March 23, 2012 4:37 PM   Subscribe

The true story of a lost child who never forgot his home, a mother who never gave up hope, and google earth.
posted by Kerasia (34 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
oh my, there seems to be something in my eye.
posted by nadawi at 4:51 PM on March 23, 2012 [5 favorites]


Very impressive. I remember very little from 5 years old.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:13 PM on March 23, 2012


Stuff like this happens all the time, Jonathan ended up in Sweden after he got on a train in India 30 years ago or so.
posted by Iteki at 5:16 PM on March 23, 2012 [2 favorites]


Clarification: "stuff like this" is lost children being adopted internationally, not people using google earth to retrace their childhood steps.
posted by Iteki at 5:17 PM on March 23, 2012


I was surprised to read that, once transported to Calcutta, he was unable to communicate with anyone because his native language was Hindi. Although Calcutta is a Bengali-speaking city, isn't Hindi the official language of India? He was in a government detention center and an orphanage, after all.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 5:20 PM on March 23, 2012


Oh my god.
posted by LobsterMitten at 5:36 PM on March 23, 2012


Harvey Kilobit: "Although Calcutta is a Bengali-speaking city, isn't Hindi the official language of India? He was in a government detention center and an orphanage, after all."

Yes, but remember, he was 5. I don't think he'd have been able to figure out how to get to the people who spoke his language immediately.
posted by ocherdraco at 5:56 PM on March 23, 2012 [1 favorite]


Wow.
Yes, but remember, he was 5. I don't think he'd have been able to figure out how to get to the people who spoke his language immediately.
Well, clearly the government failed here. I mean, if a 5 year old kid who doesn't speak English is lost in the U.S we don't expect them to locate their own translator, right?

It sounds like he didn't even know the name of his own home town. But, had he been able to tell then how long he'd been on the train, they probably would have been able to narrow it down quite a bit.
Very impressive. I remember very little from 5 years old.
We moved when we I was 3 and a half or so, and because of that, I can put a definite upper bound on a lot early memories.

Supposedly kids brains go through a change around age three that builds the structures people will use to store memories throughout the rest of their lives. The result of this, though is that they end up forgetting a lot of the stuff they used to know.
posted by delmoi at 6:12 PM on March 23, 2012


Awwww. What a story. And what a fascinating use of Google Earth.

Yes, but remember, he was 5. I don't think he'd have been able to figure out how to get to the people who spoke his language immediately.

And from the story, he didn't even know what question to ask -- I know I wouldn't have known what to say or ask at that age.
posted by Forktine at 6:13 PM on March 23, 2012


I guess my mom was kind of paranoid, she had me memorize our address and phone number, as well as 911.
posted by delmoi at 6:17 PM on March 23, 2012 [4 favorites]


delmoi - doesn't sound like you have a lot of understanding how your own childhood might have differed from a lost kid from rural India suddenly thrust into Calcutta.
posted by Rumple at 6:21 PM on March 23, 2012 [12 favorites]


I guess my mom was kind of paranoid, she had me memorize our address and phone number, as well as 911.

At five, I could probably have told you my street address (I can still remember part of it, actually) -- but not necessarily the name of the town we were living in. They wouldn't have had a phone back then, so that wouldn't have helped.

I mean, sure -- as an adult, I can say that he should have found the right kind of adult, said the right things, etc, but to expect that of a five year old? It's amazing that he did as well as he did, survived, avoided the predators, and made it through the adoption system.
posted by Forktine at 6:22 PM on March 23, 2012 [3 favorites]


In kindergarten, I remember declaring to the teacher "The house with all of the flowers!" in response to where did I live.
Mind you, I was working from a hearing/vision deficit so my mother had mostly focused upon numbers and vocabulary.
but...yeah I would not have been able to get back home on my own had I wound up hours from my home at the age of 5 :(
posted by Librarygeek at 6:49 PM on March 23, 2012


I was surprised to read that, once transported to Calcutta, he was unable to communicate with anyone because his native language was Hindi. Although Calcutta is a Bengali-speaking city, isn't Hindi the official language of India

The fact that he was a kid and was probably traumatized and all that for one. Then there's also class, I suppose; middle and upper middle kids are taught to tell their addresses and parents' names if they're lost. Perhaps the family didn't think of that.

Thing is, 1400 km is a lot of distance for many people, or would have been a lot of distance for a lot of people. You have to understand, Khandwa is near the Maharashtran border; the kid essentially went from the Cotton belt, crossed the Narmada ravines, the Gangetic plains, and the delta mangroves to reach Calcutta. It is a mundane train trip, but only if you knew where you were going; if you set out from London, you'd reach Rome after a 1400 km train ride.

Wouldn't be surprised if the Hindi there is influenced by Marathi or Urdu; so even if the kid found an Urdu speaker, he may have had a problem communicating with her.

For another, things were quite different twenty years back; you really had to speak the local language to get around. Just as there has been globalization, I do believe there has this been process of an _Indianization_ as well, in that there's a lot more cultural mobility than before. So now you have auto-drivers in Bangalore speaking fluent Tamil or Malayalam in addition to the local language, Kannada or Calcuttan screens showing Telugu movies. My team in India speaks ten languages among themselves; there's this girl who can and will participate in any conversation around her in any of the six languages she speaks effortlessly.

But all that is only now, after a generation of inter-mingling.
posted by the cydonian at 6:55 PM on March 23, 2012 [9 favorites]


My stepmom had my younger brother and sister memorize a complete song (she'd sing it to them, with them, etc., all the freaking time):

"[brother's full legal name]'s address is:
Number, Street
Number, Street
Number, Street
City, State, word that rhymes with the last word in the street name
[brother's full legal name]'s address is:
Number, Street"

I thought she was nuts. I am, at present, reevaluating my position.

Yes, I can totally sing the song. Yes, I have used it when trying to remember that particular address. There was another song for the phone number, and I have that one memorized too. Thank goodness they've never moved or changed their number, because this would be a profound waste of brain space if they had.

Also, I completely want to cry thinking about this tiny kid trying train after train, hoping one would take him home. I am so glad he was able to find someplace safe and happy and loving to grow up in - a place where that can happen to one kid, though, is a place where it did happen to a bunch of kids whose endings weren't nearly so heartwarming, I'm sure.
posted by SMPA at 7:40 PM on March 23, 2012 [14 favorites]


It sounds like he didn't even know the name of his own home town. But, had he been able to tell then how long he'd been on the train, they probably would have been able to narrow it down quite a bit.

He knew the name of the train station (or, a close approximation) but there were so many towns and so many train stations that even knowing that didn't narrow it down. And the way he eventually figured out where his town was was exactly because he remembered to a shocking degree of accuracy how long he had been on the train.
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:41 PM on March 23, 2012


I can't believe that some people here are blaming THE FIVE-YEAR-OLD KID for not being clever enough to find someone to take him home, or his IMPOVERISHED RURAL FAMILY in this situation for not having the kid memorize some sort of information that would have made his homecoming easier.

They lived in rural India 30 years ago. They might not even have HAD an address in the traditional sense (think "the third house on the street"), and certainly would not have had a phone number. The guy says he tried to get several adults to help him and none were interested. He says that there were THREE THOUSAND other lost children in Calcutta.

It was way, way easier given the circumstances for the local officials to send him to an agency to adopt him out to comparatively wealthy foreigners than to try to track down his real parents. Not better. Not right. Just easier.

So they did the easy, wrong thing. It wasn't the kid's fault, or his family's either.

I'm glad he found his way home.
posted by BlueJae at 8:01 PM on March 23, 2012 [22 favorites]


One extra-sad bit here is that his brother was apparently killed; that may have been why Ben wasn't woken up, and why he ended up in a strange city. Assuming that the death was foul play, the murderer very nearly ended two lives, without even knowing about the second.
posted by Malor at 8:25 PM on March 23, 2012 [2 favorites]


Actually India has over 20 official languages. Library school homework FTW!

Plus, great story. Yay for Saroo and his family!
posted by holyrood at 8:38 PM on March 23, 2012


I continue to be dismayed by how the Internet is becoming (has already become?!) TV part II. In addition to SLYT warnings I'd like to see TVII warnings. The net can offer so much more than a traditional news program video with a compulsory advertisement at the beginning.
posted by parrot_person at 8:44 PM on March 23, 2012 [1 favorite]


My daughter, at 2½ knows her first and last name, Mommy's first and last name, and Daddy's first and last name. It takes a long time and a lot of "emmms!" (m&m's) to get a toddler that far. We're drilling her on Mommy's cell number, now, and as soon as we're moved into our new house, she'll get a whole bunch of "emmms" for knowing her street address.

India has two "official" languages, which are as official as the local authorities believe they are - English and Hindi - and twenty-one "mother tongues." India isn't a nation as much as it is a continent - think of Europe, with its profligacy of languages, and then double the population density and extend its earliest written history back a millenium. A kind speaking Hindi (which dialect?) would absolutely be lost in a Bengali-speaking culture.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:04 PM on March 23, 2012 [1 favorite]


I cannot imagine how traumatic it would be for a 5 year old kid with little education or experience of the world outside his village to be dropped into Howrah Station like that. His dialect didn't match the Kolkata natives, he's 1400km from home and Kolkata is a madhouse with Howrah at its center. Moving story.
posted by N-stoff at 9:21 PM on March 23, 2012


India has over 150 'mother tongues' or first languages. It is quite likely that Saroo spoke a local language as well as a bit of Hindi, or a Hindi/language mix. His accent may also have stymied his attempts to be understood. And as BlueJae says, they probably didn't have a street address at all, just a locality.

For those who have not been to India, children hanging around the station and the streets, even kids as young as 4 or 5, is not uncommon. They may be collecting plastic water bottles from between the railway tracks, or acting as a runner for a tea wallah, or asking for alms or just hanging around for something to do, to find a treasure of a rupee or two.

His brother may have died a number of ways; a predator is not the most common. Maybe hit by a train, or fell from a roof of a train, or was pushed out of a crowded third-class compartment, or fell between the door and the platform. He could have died from any number of the accidents that poor kids suffer in India.

I am amazed at Saroo's memory and his mother's insistence that he was alive and coming home. Those two bonds of love are the strengths of this story for me.
posted by Kerasia at 10:02 PM on March 23, 2012 [5 favorites]


This story actually made me cry a bit. That doesn't happen that often when I read news stories.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:17 PM on March 23, 2012 [1 favorite]


This reminds me of Empire of the Sun.
posted by timsneezed at 12:50 AM on March 24, 2012 [1 favorite]


oh my, there seems to be something in my eye.

Me too, they seem to be tears.

That's the sort of story you hope to read on a Saturday morning.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:25 AM on March 24, 2012


I didn't quite understand how he came to be sent to Australia.
posted by Segundus at 2:45 AM on March 24, 2012


I guess my mom was kind of paranoid, she had me memorize our address and phone number, as well as 911.
911. Never Forget.
posted by Sonny Jim at 3:00 AM on March 24, 2012 [1 favorite]


to this day i ask my sons, 12 and 14 years old, what's our address and telephone number. i made them memorize this information as soon as they could speak. and am not even exaggerating.
posted by liza at 7:54 AM on March 24, 2012 [1 favorite]


I'm really curious about the reactions of Saroo's adoptive family, the Brierleys. Did they know he was looking for his family; did they encourage him to do so? Have the adoptive and birth families met each other?

I've read about international adoption horror stories with various shady adoption agencies lying to adoptive parents about kids being orphaned, when their families are very much alive and in contact with the agency. That's not really the case here: Saroo wasn't stolen, he effectively WAS an orphan, and there was no way (seemingly) an adoption agent would be properly equipped to find his family again. But I wonder if the Brierleys were told "This kid says he has a family, but we have no idea where they are or how to reach them, and he's better off with you than in an orphanage / on the street" (all of which is true), or if the first they heard about this original family was the way those horror-story adopting families did: from Saroo himself when he learned enough English to tell them, months/years later on another continent, with all the papers signed and the trails gone cold.
posted by nicebookrack at 8:31 AM on March 24, 2012


This reminds me of Empire of the Sun.

Except for the lack of concentration camps, and the fact that Saroo didn't grow up to become J.G. Ballard.
posted by localroger at 10:25 AM on March 24, 2012 [1 favorite]


Wow. Makes me want to microchip my kid's ear...
posted by Omnomnom at 5:06 PM on March 24, 2012


"I've read about international adoption horror stories with various shady adoption agencies lying to adoptive parents about kids being orphaned, when their families are very much alive and in contact with the agency. That's not really the case here: Saroo wasn't stolen, he effectively WAS an orphan, and there was no way (seemingly) an adoption agent would be properly equipped to find his family again. But I wonder if the Brierleys were told 'This kid says he has a family, but we have no idea where they are or how to reach them, and he's better off with you than in an orphanage / on the street' (all of which is true), or if the first they heard about this original family was the way those horror-story adopting families did: from Saroo himself when he learned enough English to tell them, months/years later on another continent, with all the papers signed and the trails gone cold."

Those are all good, uncomfortable issues.

When I was reading this, I kept having the uncomfortable thought, "wow, this all really worked out for the best". After all, Saroo's brother died, his mother continued to live in poverty, he likely would have grown into terribly poverty and no education.

But thinking this way is very in parallel to colonialist thinking. I'm not automatically saying I'm wrong. But if there's any truth to this, then that brings us very close to the typical international adoption stories where the presumption is that these children will be better off, anyway, even if they're stolen or sold.

One is hard-pressed not to wonder why the parents didn't make an effort to find Saroo's hometown and family. And one is hard-pressed not to suspect that they didn't think it was for the best that they not be found. I have a hard time not thinking that it was best they were not found.

I don't have any good answers here. I wish I did.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:11 PM on March 24, 2012


I've been thinking about the limitation of articles like this to answer all the questions raised by curious people like ourselves.

We have no idea of the efforts or not of his adoptive parents because it is not mentioned along with many other omitted details. Although it is tempting to fill in the blanks ourselves with thoughts and information that we have gathered from other situations, it is unfair to the subjects of our curiosity to make guesses at the truth and then draw conclusions from those guesses.

Like Ivan, I too wish I had more information, more answers to my questions and I hope there is a longer documentary or article made of this delightful reunion.
posted by Kerasia at 9:30 PM on March 24, 2012


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