8.
Resuming the Search
By now, I should have been used to life’s many unexpected twists and turns. But things still manage to take me completely by surprise, and though I might have become better than some at coping with new circumstances—changes of career, of location, even of fortune—emotional changes can hit me as hard as they do anyone else. Perhaps even a little harder.
Working with Dad and learning to be a salesman was great—I do it to this day—but my relationship with my girlfriend proved tempestuous and we went through a difficult breakup. Although I was the one to end it, I found myself bereft and full of regret. I moved back into my parents’ home and went through a dark period of conflicting emotions: rejection, disappointment, bitterness, loneliness, and a sense of failure. I sometimes didn’t make it to work or made careless errors. My parents wondered when I’d pull myself back together to be the positive, forward-looking man into which they thought I’d developed.
I was lucky to have made good friends over the years. A fortuitous meeting with Byron, a guy I’d known from my hospitality days, ended with him suggesting I move into a spare room at his place for a while. He had become a doctor and he introduced me to a new crowd. His kindness and the fresh faces I met really helped pick me up. If family has been the most important thing in my life, friends have not been far behind.
Byron was always going out and enjoying himself, and I liked to join him occasionally, but I was also glad to spend some time alone at home. Although I became much less depressed since right after the breakup, I was still thinking about it and wondering how to think of myself as an individual rather than part of a couple. And although I don’t think my childhood made this process any easier or harder, it got me thinking once again in earnest about my life in India.
Byron had broadband Internet access at home and I had a new, fast laptop. Even in the periods when I hadn’t felt that retracing my past was imperative, I’d never forgotten about it or ruled it out completely. In this new phase of my life, I had a fuller connection with my parents through the family business, and even felt I was giving back to them a little. That gave me the security to face the emotional risks of the search again. Yes, there was a lot to lose—each failure to find my childhood home chipped away at the certainty of my memories—but there was also much to gain. I wondered whether I might be avoiding the search, and also if the confidence I’d had that it wasn’t affecting my ability to get on with the rest of my life was perhaps overstated. At the very least, was this just my failure to buckle down, much like my teenage drifting? And what if, by the slimmest of chances, I managed to find my old home? How could I pass up the chance of discovering where I was from, and maybe even finding my birth mother?
I decided that resuming the search—in a low-key way—would be part of regaining a positive outlook on life. Maybe the past could help shape the future.
• • •
Alas, the new search didn’t start out as an obsession.
If Byron wasn’t home, I might spend a couple of hours musing over the various “B” towns again. Or I might make a casual sweep down the east coast, to see what was there. I even checked out a Birampur in Uttar Pradesh, near Delhi, in the central north of India, but that was a ridiculously long way from Kolkata, and I couldn’t have traveled that far in twelve or so hours. It turned out it doesn’t even have a train station.
These occasional forays showed the folly of searching by town, particularly when I wasn’t sure about the names. If I was going to do this, I needed to be strategic and methodical about it.
I went over what I knew. I came from a place where Muslims and Hindus lived in close proximity and where Hindi was spoken. Those things were true of most of India. I recalled all those warm nights outside, under the stars, which at least suggested it wouldn’t be in the colder regions of the far north. I hadn’t lived by the sea, although I couldn’t rule out that I’d lived near it. And I hadn’t lived in the mountains. My hometown had a railway station—India was riddled with train lines, but they didn’t run through every single village and town.
Then there was the opinion of the Indians at college that I looked like someone from the east, perhaps around West Bengal. I had my doubts: in the eastern part of the country, the region took in some of the Himalayas, which wasn’t right, and part of the Ganges Delta, which looked much too lush and fertile to be my home. But as these were people who had firsthand experience of India, it seemed silly to dismiss their hunch.
I also thought I could remember enough landmark features to recognize my hometown if I came across it, or to at least narrow the field. I clearly recalled the bridge over the river where we played as kids and the nearby dam wall that restricted the river’s flow below it. I knew how to get from the train station to our house, and I knew the layout of the station.
The other station I thought I remembered quite well was the “B” one, where I’d boarded the train. Although I’d been there quite a few times with my brothers, they’d never let me leave it, so I knew nothing of the town outside the station—all I’d ever seen beyond the exit was a sort of small ring road for horse carts and cars, and a road beyond it that led into the town. But still, there were a couple of distinguishing features. I remembered the station building and that it only had a couple of tracks, over the other side of which was a big water tank on a tower. There was also a pedestrian overpass across the tracks. And just before the train pulled into town from the direction of my home, it crossed a small gorge.
So I had some vague thoughts on likely regions, and some ways of identifying “Ginestlay” and the “B” place if I found them. Now I needed a better search method. I realized that the names of places had been a distraction, or were at least not the right place to start. Instead, I thought about the end of the journey. I knew that train lines linked the “B” place with Kolkata. Logic dictated, then, that if I followed all the train lines out of Kolkata, I would eventually find my starting point. And from there, my hometown was itself up the line, not far away. I might even come upon my home first, depending on how the lines linked up. This was an intimidating prospect—there were many, many train lines from the national hub of Kolkata’s Howrah Station, and my train might have zigzagged across any of the lines of the spider’s web. It was unlikely to be a simple, straight route.
Still, even with the possibility of some winding, irregular paths out of Howrah, there was also a limit to how far I could have been transported in the time frame. I’d spent, I thought, a long time on the train—somewhere between twelve and fifteen hours. If I made some calculations, I could narrow the search field, ruling out places too far away.
Why hadn’t I thought of the search with this clarity before? Maybe I had been too overwhelmed by the scale of the problem to think straight, too consumed by what I didn’t know to focus on what I did. But as it dawned on me that I could turn this into a painstaking, deliberate task that simply required dedication, something clicked inside. If all it took were time and patience to find home, with the aid of Google Earth’s god’s-eye view, then I would do it. Seeing it almost as much an intellectual challenge as an emotional quest, I threw myself into solving it.
• • •
First, I worked on the search zone. How fast could India’s diesel trains travel, and would that have changed much since the eighties? I thought my Indian friends from college might be able to help, especially Amreen, whose father would likely have a more educated guess, so I got in touch with them. The general consensus was around seventy or eighty kilometers an hour. That seemed like a good start. Figuring I had been trapped on the train for around twelve to fifteen hours, overnight, I calculated how many kilometers I might have traveled in that time, which I put at around a thousand, or approximately 620 miles.
So the place I was looking for was a thousand kilometers along a train line out of Howrah Station. On Google Earth you can draw lines on the map at precise distances,
so I made a circular boundary line of a thousand kilometers around Kolkata and saved it for my searches. That meant that as well as West Bengal, my search field included the states of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and nearly half of the central state of Madhya Pradesh to the west, Orissa to the south, Bihar and a third of Uttar Pradesh to the north, and most of the northeastern spur of India, which encircles Bangladesh. (I knew I wasn’t from Bangladesh, as I’d have spoken Bengali, not Hindi. This was confirmed when I discovered that a rail connection between the two countries had only been established a few years ago.)
• • •
It was a staggering amount of territory, covering some 962,300 square kilometers, over a quarter of India’s huge landmass. Within its bounds lived 345 million people. I tried to keep my emotions out of the exercise, but I couldn’t help but wonder: Is it possible to find my four family members among these 345 million? Even though my calculations were reliant on guesswork and were therefore very rough, and even though that still presented me with a huge field within which to search, it felt like I was narrowing things down. Rather than randomly throwing the haystack around to find the needle, I could concentrate on picking through a manageable portion and set it aside if it proved empty.
The train lines within the search zone wouldn’t all simply stretch out to the edge in a straight radius, of course—there would be a lot of twists, turns, and junctions, as they wound around and traveled much more than a thousand kilometers before they reached the boundary edge. So I planned to work outward from Kolkata, the only point of the journey I was certain about.
The first time I zoomed in on Howrah Station, looking at the rows of ridged gray platform roofs and all the tracks spilling out of it like the fraying end of a rope, I was amazed and shocked that I’d once trod barefoot along these walkways. I had to open my eyes wide to make sure what I was looking at was real. I was about to embark on a high-tech version of what I’d done in my first week there, twenty years ago, randomly taking trains out to see if they went back home.
I took a deep breath, chose a train line, and started scrolling along it.
• • •
Immediately, it became clear that progress would be slow. Even with broadband, my laptop had to render the image, which took time. It started a little pixelated, then resolved into an aerial photograph. I was looking for landmarks I recognized and paid particular attention to the stations, as they were the places I remembered most vividly.
When I first zoomed out to see how far I’d gone along the track, I was amazed at how little progress the hours of scrolling and studying had brought me. But rather than being frustrated and impatient, I found I had enormous confidence that I would find what I was looking for as long as I was thorough. That gave me a great sense of calm as I resumed my search. In fact, it quickly became compelling, and I returned to it several nights a week. Before I turned in each night, I’d mark how far I’d gone on a track and save the search, then resume from that point at the next opportunity.
I would come across goods yards, overpasses and underpasses, bridges over rivers and junctions. Sometimes I skipped along a bit but then nervously went back to repeat a section, reminding myself that if I wasn’t methodical, I could never be sure I’d looked everywhere. I didn’t jump ahead to look for stations in case I missed a small one—I followed the tracks so I could check out anything that came along. And if I found myself reaching the edge of the boundary I’d devised, I’d go back along the train line to a previous junction and then head off in another direction.
I remember one night early on, following a line north, I came to a river crossing not far outside a town. I caught my breath as I zoomed in closer. The dam wall was decaying, but maybe the area had since been reconstructed? I quickly dragged the cursor to roll the image along. Did the countryside look right? It was quite green, but there were a lot of farms on the outskirts of my town. I watched as the town unpixelated before my eyes. It was quite small. Too small, surely. But with a child’s perspective . . . And there was a high pedestrian overpass across the tracks near the station! But what were the large blank areas dotted around the town? Three lakes, four or five even, within the tiny village’s bounds—and it was suddenly obvious that this wasn’t the place. You didn’t clear whole neighborhoods to put in lakes. And of course, many, many stations were likely to have overpasses, and many towns would be situated near life-giving rivers, which the tracks would have to cross. How many times would I wonder if all the landmarks aligned, only to be left with tired, sore eyes and the realization that I was mistaken again?
Weeks and then months passed with my spending hours at a time every couple of nights on the laptop. Byron made sure I spent other nights out in the real world so I didn’t become an Internet recluse. I covered the countryside of West Bengal and Jharkhand in these early stages without finding anything familiar, but at least it meant that much of the immediate vicinity of Kolkata could be ruled out. Despite the hunch of my Indian friends, I’d come from farther away.
Several months later, I was lucky enough to meet someone with whom I started a new relationship, which made the search less of a priority for a while. Lisa and I met in 2010 through a friend of Byron’s and mine. We became friends on Facebook, and then I asked her for her phone number. We hit it off immediately; Lisa’s background is in business management and she is smart, pretty, and can hold a great conversation. However, we had an unsettled start together, with a couple of breakups and reunions, which meant there was a similar inconsistency in the periods I spent looking on the Internet, before we finally settled into the lasting relationship we have today.
I didn’t know how a girlfriend would take to the time-consuming quest of her partner staring at maps on a laptop. But Lisa understood the personal and growing importance of the search, and was patient and supportive. She was as amazed as anyone about my past, and wanted me to find the answers I was looking for. We moved into a small flat together in 2010. I thought of the nights I spent there on the laptop as being a pastime, like playing computer games. But Lisa says that even then, with our relationship in full swing, I was obsessive. Looking back, I can see that this was true.
After all the years of my story being in my thoughts and dreams, I felt I was closing in on the reality. I decided this time I wasn’t going to listen to anybody who said, “It might be time to move on,” or “It’s just not possible to find your hometown in all of India like this.” Lisa never said those things, and with her support, I became even more determined to succeed.
I didn’t tell many people what I was doing anyway. And I decided not to tell my parents. I was worried they might misunderstand my intentions. I didn’t want them to think that the intensity of my search revealed an unhappiness with the life they’d given me or the way they’d raised me. I also didn’t want them to think that I was wasting time. So even as it took up more and more of my life, I kept it mostly to myself. I finished work with Dad at five p.m., and by five-thirty I would be back at the laptop, slowly advancing along train tracks and studying the towns they led to. This went on for months—it had been over a year since I started. But I reasoned that even if it took years . . . or decades . . . it was possible to eventually sift completely through a haystack. The needle would have to show up if I persisted.
Slowly, over several more months, I eliminated whole areas of India. I traced all the connections within the northeastern states without finding anything familiar, and I was confident that I could rule out Orissa, too. Determined to be thorough, no matter how long it took, I started following lines farther out than my original thousand-kilometer zone. South beyond Orissa, I eliminated Andhra Pradesh, five hundred kilometers farther down the east coast. Jharkhand and Bihar didn’t offer up anything promising, either, and as I wound up in Uttar Pradesh, I thought I’d keep going to cover most of the state. In fact, the states eventually replaced my zone boundary as a way of marking my progress. Ruling out areas state by state provided a s
eries of goals that spurred me on.
Unless I had something pressing to do for work, or some other unbreakable commitment, I was on the laptop seven nights a week. I went out with Lisa sometimes, of course, but the moment we got home I was back on the computer. Sometimes I caught her looking at me strangely, as though she thought I might have gone a bit crazy. She’d say, “You’re at it again!” but I would reply, “I have to . . . I’m really sorry!” I think Lisa knew she simply had to let me exhaust myself of the interest. I became distant during that time, and although Lisa would have been within her rights to feel alone in this still-new relationship, we worked through it. Perhaps to some extent sharing something so fundamental to me strengthened our connection—and that came through when we sometimes talked about what it all meant. It wasn’t always easy for me to articulate, especially as I was trying to keep a lid on my expectations, trying to convince myself it was a fascinating exercise, not a deeply meaningful personal quest. Talking to Lisa sometimes revealed the underlying importance of the search to me: that I was looking for my home to provide closure and to understand my past and perhaps myself better as a result, in the hope that I might somehow reconnect with my Indian family so they would know what had happened to me. Lisa understood all this and didn’t resent it, even if there were times when she wanted to ban me from staring at the screen for my own sake. Once in a while she would simply come over and shut my laptop and place it on the floor because I was becoming so obsessive about my search.
At times Lisa admitted her own greatest fear: that I would find what I thought I was looking for, go back to India, and somehow be wrong or fail to find my family there. Would I return to Hobart and simply start again, obsessively searching online? I couldn’t answer her questions any more than I could allay her fears. I couldn’t allow myself to think about failure.
A Long Way Home Page 12
