RailEnquiry

It all began with a train ride into the unknown. The journey took him places and 25 years later, has finally come to an end. In a story that has enough fodder for a blockbuster movie, 31-year-old Saroo Brierley of Hobart, Australia, has at last managed to reunite with his biological mother living in a small, impoverished house in Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh.Saroo Brierley is seen with friends in Australia. If Saroo's journey to Australia is one hell of a tale, then his reunification with his mother is even more fascinating. Saroo was just five years old when he went missing. Saroo, who would often accompany his brother to work as a cleaner on trains, fell asleep at a station one day. He hoped his brother would wake him up, but when he opened his eyes, it was the dead of the night and his brother was nowhere to be seen."I saw a train in front of me and thought he (the brother) must be on that train. I decided to get on it," Saroo told the BBC in an interview that has now gone viral.A young Saroo. Failing to find his brother, a tired Saroo went to sleep on the train and woke up some 14 hours later. From the plains of Madhya Pradesh, the train by then had carried him to Kolkata. All alone in the bustling metropolis and unable to recall the name of the place where he had come from, the five-year-old had to resort to begging to survive.

Very soon he found himself in an orphanage where he was put up for adoption. Life took a dramatic turn when an Australian couple adopted him.

The Brierleys took him to Tasmania where he earned a bachelor's degree in business management and joined his foster family's engineering firm. But he would often think about his family back in India and one day decided to try out Google Earth.

Click here to Enlarge Saroo remembered having travelled for around 14 hours in the train to Kolkata. Estimating the speed of the train to be about 80 kilometres an hour, he calculated that his hometown could be around 1,400km from Kolkata. Saroo then drew a circle on a map with Kolkata as the centre and very soon stumbled upon Khandwa. "When I found it, I zoomed on it and bang, it just came up. I navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play," Saroo told the BBC. Soon he reached Khandwa and was standing in front of his home in Ganesh Talai. But his family had shifted from that house and the locals helped him reunite with his mother.

"The last time I saw her she was 34 years old and a pretty lady," he said. Saroo's mother, who had given up her son as dead, was speechless. "She could not say anything to me. 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." He learnt that his brother was found dead on a railway track soon after he went missing. But amid the gloom there was some good news. Spurred on by the success of Slumdog Millionaire, publishers and filmmakers are now showing interest in Saroo's amazing tale.