A Long Way Home

by Saroo Brierley

  Although I’d become quite used to the change of color and culture around me, I still stood out to everyone else, especially since I have white parents. Other kids talked about their families and how they came from the country or from Melbourne, and they would ask me where I was from, but all I could say was “I’m from India.” But kids are curious—they wanted to know why I was here in a white family. Mum defused a lot of this by attending a parent-student day and telling the class about my adoption. It seemed to satisfy my peers, and they didn’t ask much after that.

  I don’t remember any racism at school. Mum, however, tells me there were some things said that I didn’t understand properly. Perhaps that was an advantage in having to master the local language from scratch. Apparently I once asked her, “What’s a ‘black basket’?” which upset her. She chose not to explain that someone had called me a “black bastard.”

  Another time, my dad and I were lining up to register me for a sports team. The woman in front of us glanced back and then said in a low voice to the coach, “I don’t want my son on the same team as that black boy.”

  We just ignored it, signed up for the team roster, and left. I don’t mean to make light of comments like that, but in comparison with the experiences I’ve heard from other non-Anglos, I don’t think I had it too bad, and I’ve always felt that I grew up without any scars from racism.

  That might not have been true for Mum and Dad. I’m told we did attract some negative attention at the local Indian Cultural Society, which conducted dinners and dances. There was quite a large Indian community in Hobart, from Fiji and South Africa as well as from India, and for a time we went along and enjoyed the society’s events. But my parents came to notice that we were treated a little suspiciously, and determined that it was considered somehow wrong for an Indian child to be taken from India by white parents. Needless to say, I was oblivious to this.

  Another organization we were involved in was ASIAC, the Australian Society for Intercountry Aid (Children), which helped people adopt from overseas. Mum became very active, helping other Australian families with the constantly changing processes as well as the personal challenges. Through that organization, I met other children who’d come to Australia from elsewhere and now lived in mixed-race families. Mum tells me that at our first ASIAC picnic I seemed surprised—and perhaps a little put out—to discover I wasn’t the only “special one” in Hobart. Yet I made friends, one of whom was Ravi, another Indian boy who lived with his new family in Launceston, and our families visited each other often during those early years.

  ASIAC also put me back in touch with some of the other kids from Nava Jeevan. My closest friend, Asra, had ended up with a family in the riverside Victorian town of Winchelsea, and our families had kept us in phone contact. A year after I arrived, all of us met up at a zoo in Melbourne with the two other kids from the orphanage who had been adopted into Australia, Abdul and Musa. I was overjoyed to see familiar faces, and we all busily compared notes on our new lives, measuring them against our time in the orphanage together. Although it hadn’t been a terrible place, I don’t think any of us wished ourselves back there. We didn’t talk about our past lives in India, but it seemed to me that each of them was as happy in their new homes as I was.

  Later the same year Mrs. Sood herself arrived in Hobart, escorting another new adoptee, Asha, whom I remembered from the orphanage. It made me happy to see Mrs. Sood again—she’d taken good care of us, and until I left India, she was probably the most friendly and trustworthy person I had met after becoming lost. I like to think that for her part it must have been satisfying to see some of the children she’d helped in their new environments. Mrs. Sood dealt with a huge amount of trauma among her charges, but I’ve always thought the rewards must have been equally large. I’m sure that some adoptions don’t work out as well as mine did, but I also imagine that occasional visits to the children she’d connected with new families gives her renewed energy to return to work.

  • • •

  I was no slouch in school, despite the fact that my English was still under development. I got on well with my teachers and loved them, and they seemed to love me, too. In my middle primary years, I did very well, even skipping a year, which coincided with a huge growth spurt. Then when I got to secondary school, the gap in my learning from that missed year became evident, and I struggled with written language for a while. Outside of school, my mum and dad continued to take me camping, sailing, and hiking. I loved the outdoors as they did, and we went on many fun holidays together. I felt safe and secure in my new life.

  • • •

  When I was ten, Mum and Dad adopted a second child from India. I was keen on the idea of having a sibling. In fact, it seemed that the person I missed most from India was my sister. “What do you want for Christmas?” my mum would ask me every year. “I want Shekila back,” I often said.

  Of course, I missed my mother deeply, but from the first moment that I was introduced to Mum, she had done a brilliant job of being a mother to me, and having a father’s attention also made me very happy. They couldn’t replace my being with my birth mother, but they did lessen the loss as much as they could. The one person really absent from my life was a brother or sister—especially for someone used to being left for long periods without any parent around when I was in my home village.

  In India, Shekila had been my special responsibility. She was the family member I was most closely bonded with, and most haunted by. I worried that she might be sick or hungry, that her hands and face weren’t clean. I had been her guardian, and it was hard not to know what was happening to her now. Sometimes I told my mum that I felt guilty for not looking after Shekila as well as I should have. With all this on my mind, I was looking forward to having a sibling in Australia. When Mum and Dad had applied to adopt the first time, they hadn’t put any gender conditions or restrictions of any kind on their application. They were happy to have whatever child needed a home; that’s how they got me. So they did exactly the same thing the second time. We might have acquired a young girl, or a child older than me, but as it happened, we got my little brother, Mantosh.

  I didn’t care that he wasn’t a sister—the idea of having another child to play with at home was enough for me. And—assuming he’d be rather quiet and shy at first, like I was—I thought I could help him adjust to this new life. He’d be someone for me to help look after.

  But Mantosh and I were very different, partly because of the natural differences between people, but also because of our different experiences in India. It’s one of the things that makes people who adopt children, especially from abroad, so brave: often the kids they’re taking in come with troubled backgrounds, having suffered in ways that make adjusting to their new life difficult, which can be hard to understand and even harder to help. At first I was reticent and reserved; Mantosh was loud and disobedient. I wanted to please; he rebelled.

  What we did have in common was that Mantosh’s background had a lot of unknowns in it, too. He’d also grown up poor and with no formal education, and he can’t say for sure exactly where or when he was born. He arrived as a nine-year-old with no birth certificate, medical records, or any official documentation of his origins. We celebrate his birthday on November 30 because that’s the day he landed in Australia. Like me, it was as if he simply fell to earth, but lucky for him, he landed in the care of the Brierleys in Hobart.

  Mantosh’s story as we now know it is this: He was born somewhere in or near Calcutta and grew up speaking Bengali. His mother fled their violent family home, leaving him behind, and he was sent to live with his frail grandmother. But she couldn’t even look after herself properly, much less a little boy, so she handed him over to the state and eventually he ended up in the care of ISSA and Mrs. Sood’s adoption agency, as I had. The legal process permitted orphans to live in an ISSA orphanage for two months while attempts were made to restore them to their family or arrange an a
doption. Mrs. Sood was excited by the idea of placing Mantosh with the Brierleys so we would become brothers.

  But Mantosh didn’t enjoy the same smooth process of adoption as I had. Because he did have parents, even though he couldn’t return to them—his mother’s whereabouts were unknown and his father didn’t want him—there were complications in the attempts to make him available for adoption. With his two months exhausted, he had to be transferred back to Liluah—the intimidating juvenile home I had been sent to—while ISSA continued to try to arrange his adoption by Mum and Dad. At Liluah, Mantosh wasn’t as lucky as I was. He was physically and sexually abused. Later it emerged that in the past he’d been abused by his uncles as well.

  It took two years for the complex legal procedures to be worked through, by which time he’d obviously been scarred terribly by his experiences. The only positive was that he’d learned more English than I had, which helped him when he arrived in Australia. What happened to Mantosh exposed the harm that the bureaucratic adoption system can inflict. When I learned about his past, later on, I couldn’t stop thinking about the nights I’d spent in the Liluah juvenile home, and how easily I could have experienced trauma similar to what Mantosh had experienced.

  • • •

  When Mantosh first arrived, he didn’t seem completely sure of what adoption meant—he didn’t seem to understand that his move here was permanent. The situation might not have been explained to him clearly enough, or he just wasn’t as certain as I had been that this was the right thing to do. When he began to understand that he wasn’t going back to India, he had mixed feelings—the sort of ambivalence that’s understandable in all adoptions, and which I had experienced myself, although to a much lesser extent. That was compounded by an emotional volatility doubtless caused by his traumas. When he was young, he could become explosively angry without any obvious provocation, and though he was an emaciated little boy, he could be as strong as a man. Once I asked him to give a toy back to me, and when he wouldn’t, we pushed each other around for a while. That was when I realized he was stronger than I was, despite his size. I’d never experienced anything like it, and unfortunately, it made me somewhat wary of him when we were little. Mum and Dad were patient and loving but firm, and both Mantosh and I think all the more of them for their determination to make a family out of the four of us.

  Still, although I understand things now, at the time I was unsettled. Because of the difficulties that Mantosh was going through, he required most of our parents’ attention. I was reasonably well adjusted by then, but I still needed reassurance that I was loved and cared for. Sibling rivalry born out of a perceived imbalance of parental attention at home is, of course, normal, but it’s easier for me to realize now that Mantosh and I both had insecurities from our pasts that probably made us react more strongly than most. As a result, I even ran away from home one night soon after Mantosh arrived. It was a measure of how much I’d changed—and how much I’d learned about the resilience and underlying love in a family—that I didn’t even attempt to live on the streets again. Much more typical of a Western kid testing his parents’ commitment to him, I only made it to the local bus depot around the corner. I soon got cold and hungry and went home. Although Mantosh and I had our differences, we also went swimming and fishing together, and played cricket and rode our bikes, like most young brothers.

  Mantosh didn’t enjoy school as much as I did. He was frustrated and disruptive in class, although he at least shared my enthusiasm for sport. Unlike me, he seemed to attract racist comments, to which he would retaliate and then find himself in trouble. That encouraged his bullies, who would make a game of stirring him up. Unfortunately, the teachers were ill-equipped to assist someone struggling to adjust to a new way of life. And it didn’t help that Mantosh wasn’t used to accepting direction from women in authority, a prejudice that stemmed from cultural norms in India.

  I’d had to learn some of these differences, too. Mum remembers taking me somewhere in the car once when I looked at her and said, “Lady no drive.” She pulled over and said, “If lady no drive, then boy walk!” I quickly learned my lesson.

  I know Mum feels some regret that because Mantosh needed so much of my parents’ attention, I spent more time left to my own devices than I might have otherwise. But other than throwing the occasional tantrum, I wasn’t much bothered, perhaps because that’s what I was used to in India. I liked my independence. And we still did plenty of things together as a family—we would go to a restaurant every Friday as a family outing and took trips away during school holidays.

  At one point, Mum and Dad planned a major family trip—to travel to India together. At first I was extremely enthusiastic about it, and Mantosh seemed to like the idea, too. We’d always been surrounded by Indian things and thought a lot about the country, so we all talked excitedly about what we’d see and where we’d go. Of course, neither of us knew where our hometowns were, so we’d visit other places and learn more about the country we were from.

  But as the date of the trip neared, Mantosh and I both began to feel anxious. There was no avoiding the fact that our memories of India weren’t happy ones, and the more real the prospect of going back became, the more vivid those memories seemed to be. A lot of things that we’d been able to put behind us—or at least put out of our minds—returned. I certainly didn’t want to go back to Calcutta, and I began to be agitated that any other place we visited might turn out to be my home or somewhere I would recognize. I still wanted to find my other mother, but I was happy where I was—I wanted both things. It was confusing and increasingly upsetting. And maybe subconsciously I was worried about getting lost again. I can only imagine what must have been going through Mantosh’s mind.

  In the end, our parents decided that the trip would stir up too many emotions and it was better for the moment to let sleeping dogs lie.

  6.

  My Mum’s Journey

  I couldn’t write about my journey without explaining how my parents came to make their choice to adopt two children from India. And not two specific children—as I’ve mentioned, unusual for adoptive parents from the West, they were prepared to give a home to whichever two children they were sent, of any gender, age, or circumstance. That seems to me a particularly remarkable and selfless act, and how they came to do it is part of my story.

  My mum—Sue—was born on the northwest coast of Tasmania to parents who had emigrated from central Europe after World War Two. Both of my parents had rough times growing up.

  Mum’s mother, Julie, was born in Hungary, to a poor family with fourteen children. Julie’s father went off to work in Canada as a lumberjack, with the intention of sending back money, but he never returned, abandoning his wife and all their children. The older children tried to help out as best they could, but when the war came, most of the brothers were taken away to fight and died in battle. By the time the Russians arrived in Hungary to pursue the retreating Nazis, Julie’s family had fled into Germany and didn’t return. (When the fighting ended in Hungary, some of the villagers who had been displaced tried to go back to their homes, but Julie’s family decided it was too dangerous. Many Hungarians who did return found Russians living in their homes, and when they tried to reclaim them, they were shot down in the streets.) Julie was just nineteen years old as the war was drawing to an end.

  Mum’s father, Josef, was Polish and had a traumatic childhood of his own. When he was five years old, his mother died and his father took a new wife. His stepmother hated Josef so much it’s said that she tried to poison him, and he was eventually sent away to be brought up by his grandmother. Mum says that because of his stepmother, Josef’s grandmother raised him with a deep bitterness against women.

  When Nazi Germany invaded Poland at the start of the war, Josef joined the Resistance and took part in bombing and shooting missions but became deeply disturbed by the experience. Finally, despite his role in the Resistance, he, too, fled the advanc
ing Russians and ended up in Germany.

  Josef was a good-looking man—literally tall, dark, and handsome—and when Julie met him, in the chaos at the tail end of the war, she fell in love. They married, and by the time the war was over, they had a baby, Mary. It was a turbulent period, with displaced people on the roads and on trains all across Europe. When the couple wanted to travel to the New World to start over, they managed to get themselves to Italy and boarded a ship they thought would take them to Canada, but it ended up sailing to Australia. So like a good number of refugees, they ended up in a place they hadn’t chosen and had to make the best of it.

  Julie spent at least a year in the Victorian migrant camp at Bonegilla, near Albury-Wodonga, taking care of the baby, while Josef was contracted to build houses in Tasmania and lived on his own at a work camp. The idea was that he would send for them when he had a place suitable for a family—something that must have reminded Julie of her father—but Josef was as good as his word, and when the opportunity came up to share a farm with another family outside the town of Somerset, near Burnie, Josef and Julie were reunited. Josef worked hard, and before long he bought the farm next door and built their own cottage. Mary was six when Mum was born in 1954. Sixteen months later, Mum had a younger sister, too, Christine.

  Like many survivors of the war, Josef had been left psychologically disturbed, which became more apparent as the years went on. Mum’s early upbringing was very harsh, especially because of her father’s moods, which swung between melancholia, rage, and violence. She describes him as a big, powerful, frightening man. He came from a background in which beating wives and children was commonplace.