RailEnquiry

Sydney An Indian man who lost his mother as a five-year-old has found her after 25 years from his home in Australia - using Google Earth.Saroo Brierley was separated from his family while sweeping trains in India. Then just a child, he became so tired through his back-breaking job that he fell asleep on a train.Saroo thought his brother would  wake him, but he didn’t. Instead, when he woke 14 hours later, he was miles away from home in Calcutta.With no way to get back he wandered the city’s slums and after sleeping rough for days was taken to an orphanage. He was put up for adoption, which led to him leaving India to live with a family in Tasmania.That was in 1986, but after 25 years of living in his new home the 31-year-old decided it was time to find his family. The problem was that as an illiterate five-year-old, he did not know his village name. All he had were vivid memories. So he began using Google Earth to search for where he might have been born.“It was like being Superman. You are able to take a photo mentally and ask: ‘Does this match?’,” Saroo said. “And when you say, ‘No’, you keep going on and going.”He struggled to find the location in his mind until he finally hit on a winning formula to pinpoint his Indian home. “I multiplied the time I was on the train, about 14 hours, with the speed of Indian trains and I came up with a rough distance, about 1,200 km,” he explained.Using Google, he drew a circle on a satellite map with its centre in Calcutta and its radius about the distance he thought he travelled.Amazingly it led Saroo to where his family originally lived - a place called Khandwa. “When I found it, I zoomed in and bang - it came up,” said Saroo. “I navigated it all the way from a waterfall where I used to play.”In the wake of this online discovery, Saroo travelled to India and found his family home. Sadly the house was empty as his parents had moved away, but in another stroke of luck a neighbour remembered his mother and took Saroo to  her.Speaking of his reunion with his long-lost mother, Saroo said: “The last time I saw her she was 34 years old and a pretty lady, I had forgotten that age would get the better of her. But I recognised her and I said, ‘Yes, you are my mother’.“She grabbed my hand and took me in. I think she was as numb as I was. She had a bit of trouble grasping that her son, after 25 years, had just reappeared like a ghost.” Given the success of Slum Dog Millionaire, Saroo's incredible story has already captured the interest of film-makers and may soon be played out on the big screen.