A Long Way Home

by Saroo Brierley

  Polish to the core, Josef drank a lot of vodka—every day—and also insisted on unvarying traditional meals of pan-fried pork with cabbage and potatoes. Mum hated it and became an emaciated and unhealthy child. She says to this day it still makes her feel queasy to talk about what they had to eat.

  Josef made a considerable amount of money through his building business and acquired a lot of property. Mum thinks he might even have been Somerset’s first millionaire, although no one is sure exactly how much he was worth. Unfortunately, as his condition worsened, he became delusional and deranged, and was notorious for his bad business dealings. He also refused to pay taxes on his properties. It might have had something to do with his mental health or his refusal to recognize civic authority, but he simply would not pay up. This led to his downfall and broke up the family.

  • • •

  My mum grew up quickly and managed to lift herself out of her difficult circumstances. She left school in Year 10, when her father insisted she get a job, and started work in Burnie as a pharmacy assistant. Her wage gave her some independence for the first time in her life. She earned around fifteen dollars a week, two dollars of which she was proud to give her mother for her board. She used most of the rest to assemble a glory box, or hope chest, with everything she might need for the married life she hoped would come. At sixteen, after years of stress and undernourishment at home, she felt like her life had turned around at last.

  One day on a lunch break with a couple of her girlfriends, Mum noticed a young man who was up “all the way” from Hobart—a visitor from the capital was news in Burnie. His name was John Brierley. He later asked the girls about their friend Sue, and not long afterward she had a phone call from him inviting her out.

  John was a twenty-four-year-old handsome surfie, blond and tanned, polite and easygoing. His English father was a British Airways pilot who had retired at fifty and emigrated with his family to the warmer climate of Australia. The teenage John hadn’t been too sure about leaving England at first, but once he got out to Australia and into the sun-and-surf lifestyle, there was no looking back. Dad hasn’t been to England since.

  Mum hadn’t been interested in boyfriends before she met Dad, largely because of her experiences with her father. It was only when her older sister, Mary, met her own husband-to-be that Mum first encountered a man who was decent and respectful, and who wouldn’t beat his wife and children. It helped her see that some men could be trusted.

  In 1971, a year after they met, Dad was offered a position that would require transferring to the mainland, but rather than leave Mum behind, he stayed in Tasmania and proposed. They were married on a Saturday and moved to a small flat in Hobart, and Mum started work on the following Monday at a pharmacy there. It was as if he had turned up on a white horse and swept her off her feet; the next thing they knew, they were married and creating a home together. With hard work and saving, they bought a block of land in the waterside suburb of Tranmere and started building. Mum turned twenty-one in her own home in 1975.

  Though Mum managed to leave Burnie, her family’s fortunes worsened, which affected her deeply. Her father, Josef, went bankrupt twice. The second time was for the sake of a five-hundred-dollar tax fine he refused to pay. He was sent to the Burnie lockup until his debts were cleared. Mum and the rest of the family didn’t know it then, but he had thousands of dollars secretly stashed in the house that could have bailed him out had he told them about it.

  It was the beginning of a downward spiral. The accountant appointed by the court held a fire sale to retrieve a few thousand dollars in outstanding taxes and the fine, and then claimed more than the revenue raised for his fee, leaving the family with its old debt and a new one to the accountant. When Mum was around thirty, Josef was hauled off to prison in Hobart, where, clearly suffering from alcohol withdrawal on top of everything else, he became excessively violent and was transferred to a psychiatric prison.

  There Josef borrowed money from a loan shark who in less than a year managed to take his remaining property in interest repayments, leaving the family with nothing. Mum’s mother finally left her volatile husband a year later; Josef, still in prison, threatened to kill her, blaming her for everything. She moved into a flat, where she suffered illness caused by a nearby toxic paper mill, until Mum—by this time a mother to two adopted sons—was able to bring her to join us in Hobart. Mantosh and I enjoyed having our gran close by. Though Josef had been discharged by then, Mum didn’t want to expose Mantosh and me to his troubled nature, and we never met him. He died when I was twelve.

  • • •

  Mum’s hard times made her strong-willed and determined, and gave her different priorities from the other women she knew. The early years of her marriage were a time of change in Australia: the Whitlam Government was voted in, after the upheavals of the sixties, and the social and political landscape was being transformed. Even though Mum and Dad weren’t exactly hippies, they were attracted to the “alternative” ideas being bandied about.

  People were particularly worried about overpopulation, and there was a growing concern about the impact of so many billions of people on the world’s environment. There were other issues, too, including war. Dad was fortunate to have not been sent to fight in Vietnam. Their progressive views helped Mum form the idea that one way to make a difference was to adopt children in need from developing countries.

  Because of all she’d been through growing up, Mum had decided that there was nothing sacrosanct about families formed only by birth parents. Though brought up Catholic, in a culture where women were expected to bear children, she and Dad thought the world had enough children born into it already, with many millions of them in dire need. They agreed that there were other ways to create a family beyond having children themselves.

  There was also an amazing personal moment in Mum’s past that she says put her on the path to her nontraditional family. When she was about twelve years old, the pressures from her family’s issues led her to something like a breakdown, during which she had what she can only describe as a “vision.” It left her feeling like an electric shock had gone through her. The vision was of a brown-skinned child standing by her side—she sensed it so keenly that she could even feel the child’s warmth. It was so striking she wondered about her sanity, and even whether it was possible she’d seen a ghost. But as time went by, she became more comfortable with her vision, and came to accept it as something precious, a visitation of some sort that only she knew about. It was the first time in her bleak life that she’d experienced an overwhelming feeling of something fortuitous, and she held on to it.

  As a young married adult, with a like-minded husband, she had the chance to make her vision come true. So although they were able to have children themselves, Mum and Dad agreed that they would adopt children from poor backgrounds and give them a much-needed home and loving family. Dad admits that Mum was the driving force in their decision to adopt. In fact, Mum says that she felt so strongly about it that if they hadn’t agreed on it, it might have been the end of their marriage. But Dad was more than happy with their plan, and once they’d made the decision, they never wavered.

  They were, though, given plenty of cause to rethink. As soon as they started making official inquiries, they hit a problem—under Tasmanian state law at the time, couples who could conceive weren’t permitted to adopt. For the time being, that was simply that. They didn’t change their principles; instead, they chose to sponsor children in need overseas (as they still do) and otherwise enjoy their own good fortune childlessly, dining out, sailing, and taking holidays every year.

  However, adoption always remained at the back of their collective mind. There was obviously no biological clock ticking for them, and the other constraint at the time—specifying a maximum age difference of forty years between the youngest adopting parent and the child, to avoid young children being adopted by elderly people who might struggle to take care
of them—was unlikely to affect them, as they hadn’t requested a child of any particular age.

  Sixteen years passed after their resolution to adopt. Then one day Mum met a beautiful little brown-skinned girl, Maree, who had been adopted by a local family who also had a biological son. Mum realized that meant the law preventing fertile parents from adopting must have been changed. She felt the hairs go up on the back of her neck—she had an uncanny feeling that this girl could have been the child by her side in her vision as a twelve-year-old. It prompted her to once again inquire about adoption, and to her joy she confirmed that she and Dad could now apply to adopt children from overseas. Despite having long before established the rhythms of their life, they had no hesitation about starting the process.

  After many interviews, lots of document preparations, and police checks, Mum and Dad were approved to adopt. They then had to choose a country to send their file to. They had heard from an adoption group in Victoria that the agency ISSA, in Calcutta, had a humanitarian focus and acted more quickly than elsewhere to place needy Indian children in new homes. Mum had always been fascinated by India and knew something about the conditions many people were living under there: in 1987 Australia’s population was seventeen million; that same year in India, around fourteen million children under the age of ten died from illness or starvation. Adopting one child would be a mere drop in the ocean, but it was something they could do. And it would make a huge difference to that one child. They chose India.

  Some adoptive parents wait ten years for a child that meets their conditions. They might want a baby to raise from infancy, or specifically a boy or a girl of a particular age. Mum and Dad felt it was an important part of their stance that they offer help to whoever needed it rather than have someone picked on the basis of their preferences. So they simply said they wanted “a child.”

  The motto of ISSA, run by the wonderful Mrs. Saroj Sood, is: “Somewhere a child is waiting. Somewhere a family is waiting. We at ISSA bring them together.” And in our case it really was as simple as that. Only a few weeks after submitting their application, Mum and Dad received a call to say they had been allocated a child named Saroo, who didn’t know his surname or anything else much about his origins. Mum says that from the moment they saw a copy of the picture ISSA had taken of me for a court document, they felt I was theirs.

  Mum was delighted when the word came through but also calm: somewhere inside her, she’d always felt that the vision she’d had at the age of twelve had meant it was her destiny to have an adopted child by her side. It seemed like fate had required them to wait sixteen years after deciding to adopt for me, specifically, to be ready and waiting for them. After that, things happened quickly: it was only seven months after they applied to adopt and scarcely three months after their approval that I arrived.

  • • •

  Mum believes that helping children who are in harsh circumstances in other countries—through sponsorship or adoption—is something more Australians should think about doing. The stress of the bureaucratic problems that delayed Mantosh’s adoption affected her very badly; in fact, she became dangerously ill as a result. She is an advocate of replacing Australia’s various state laws on intercountry adoption with a simplified federal law. She’s critical of governments making it too difficult to adopt and feels that if it was a little easier, maybe more families would do it.

  Mum’s story makes me feel impossibly lucky, even blessed. She became stronger because of her tough childhood, and has taken those experiences and made something worthwhile out of them. I hope to be able to do the same, as I’m sure does Mantosh. Mum’s sympathy for children who have had terrible childhoods made her a terrific mother to the children she adopted and an inspiration to us as adults. I love her for the person she is, but above all I respect her for the way she’s gone about her life and the decisions she and Dad made. Certainly, I’ll always be profoundly grateful to both my parents for the life they’ve given me.

  7.

  Growing Up

  By the time I began high school, the map of India was still on my wall, but I hardly noticed it next to my posters of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was growing up Australian—a proud Tassie.

  Of course, I hadn’t forgotten my past or stopped thinking about my Indian family. I was still determined not to forget any details of my childhood and often went through my memories in my head, as though telling myself a story. I prayed that my mother was still alive and well. Sometimes I would lie in bed, visualizing the streets of my hometown, seeing myself walking home through them, opening the door and watching over my mother and Shekila as they slept. Transported there in my mind, I would concentrate on sending them a message that I was okay and they shouldn’t worry. It was almost a meditation. But these memories were the background of my life, not the forefront. I dived into my teenage years pretty much as any other kid might.

  At secondary school there were a lot more kids from other ethnic backgrounds than in primary school—particularly Greeks, Chinese, and other Indians—so any apparent differences had dissolved. I made good friends, joined a school rock band as guitarist, and still participated in lots of activities, particularly soccer, swimming, and track and field. And because the high school was quite small, it helped Mantosh settle down, too, since more attention was given to children that needed help.

  I remained pretty independent, though, and did my own thing. By the age of fourteen, I was running off to the local pier with my friends to fool around and drink on the sly. I had a girlfriend, too. I wouldn’t say I was particularly wild, but I was spending more and more time goofing off. It’s tempting to attribute this stage of my life to my childhood and adoption, but frankly I think I just got swept away in the things that most teenagers discover.

  I’d never been particularly scholarly, but my school marks began to suffer with all my extracurricular pursuits—both sporting and social. Eventually I came up against the limit of my parents’ tolerance. Mum and Dad were determined, hardworking people, and it seemed to them that I was coasting along a little aimlessly. They gave me an ultimatum: leave school before Year 12 and get a job (as Mantosh later chose); work hard and get into university; or join the armed forces.

  This ultimatum was a shock. The idea of the military, in particular, alarmed me, as was exactly my parents’ intention. It sounded like an institutional life all too reminiscent of the homes for lost children in India that I had worked so hard to put behind me. The proposition also had a more positive effect—it reminded me of how badly I’d wanted to learn when I was in India. Here I was, being given a life filled with opportunities that I could never have imagined. I was certainly enjoying it, but maybe I wasn’t making the most of it.

  That was incentive enough to knuckle down: from then on I became a model student, shutting myself in my room after school to review the lessons, improving my marks and even rising to the top of some classes. Once I finished school, I chose a three-year accounting diploma at TAFE (technical college), with a view to using that to leverage entrance to university. I also got a job in hospitality.

  Mum and Dad’s wake-up call was not meant to pressure me to follow any particular path, and they never made me feel that I owed them anything for adopting me. As long as I was applying myself, they would support my decisions. They would have been pleased to have seen me finish the diploma, but instead of going on to university, I found that I was enjoying the money and sociability of hospitality work so much that I was happy to leave accounting behind.

  For several years, I combined work and play—I had various jobs in bars, clubs, and restaurants around Hobart, and these were good times, spinning bottles like Tom Cruise in Cocktail and promoting band nights. But when I saw my colleagues getting stuck in the rut of our business with no prospects, I knew I wanted more. I decided to get a degree in hospitality management, which I hoped would lead to more senior roles, and was fortunate enough to receive a scholarship to go to the Aust
ralian International Hotel School in Canberra. Because of my on-the-job experience, they knocked a three-year course back to a year and a half.

  Although at the time I was still living at home, I was usually working, studying, or at the home of my girlfriend, whom I’d met in college. So when it came time to move out, the prospect wasn’t a momentous one. My parents seemed pleased that I was taking the initiative. So it seemed a natural step for us all when I packed my bags and moved to Canberra, southwest of Sydney, about a three-hour flight away from Hobart. As it turned out, it was the best decision I could have made. In Canberra, my mind was unexpectedly turned again to India, and I began to think about how I might search for my childhood home.

  • • •

  When I moved into a residence hall at the college in Canberra in 2007, I quickly discovered that not only were there a lot of international students, but they were mostly Indian. The majority were from Delhi and what were by then known as Mumbai and Kolkata.

  I’d known other Indian kids at high school, but like me, they’d grown up in Australia. Getting to know this group of people was a completely different experience. They spoke English with me, but among themselves they spoke Hindi, the first time I’d heard it in years. My native language was almost completely forgotten—the Indians at high school had only spoken English, too—and so initially I experienced a kind of reverse culture shock. In the company of the international students, for the first time I was stripped of my “Indianness”—rather than being somewhat exotic, I was the Australian among the Indians.

  I was drawn to them for the basic reason that they were from the same place as I was, some of them from the very city in which I’d been lost. They had trod the same streets and had been on the same trains. They responded to my interest in them and welcomed me into their social circles. It was with this group of people that, at the age of twenty-six, I began for the first time to genuinely explore being Indian. I don’t mean in a political or academic way, or in the awkward manner of the well-meaning associations my parents had tried out. I began to feel comfortable just living in my fellow Indian students’ culture and company. We’d eat Indian food and go clubbing together, take trips to nearby towns, or gather at someone’s house to watch Hindi masala movies—those wonderful Bollywood blends of action, romance, comedy, and drama. It wasn’t false or forced; it was just a natural way of being. And the people I met weren’t associated with adoption agencies or trauma. They were just regular people who happened to be from India. They encouraged me to relearn some of my native tongue, and I also found out about some of the rapid changes that had gone on in modernizing India.