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Saroo BrierleyA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Struggling with language barriers and culture shock, Saroo checks into his hotel in Khandwa, makes his way to the suburb of Ganesh Talai, and finds his old house, which is abandoned, rundown, and smaller than he remembers. A neighbor asks if he needs assistance in Hindi. Saroo gives her his name and recites the names of his family members. Two men approach, one of whom speaks English. Saroo explains who he is and why he has come. The man takes one of Saroo’s childhood photos and asks him to wait. When he returns, he brings Saroo to another dilapidated house, where he comes face to face with his birth mother. An emotional Kamla says his name and invites him into her home. Saroo realizes he has been mispronouncing his name his entire life. Through a translator, Saroo tells Kamla about his long journey from Khandwa to Hobart 25 years earlier. Kamla expresses gratitude for Sue and John. Her words release Saroo from the guilt of leaving his birth family behind.
Saroo meets Kallu and Shekila, neither of whom speak English. He is devastated to learn that his brother Guddu was fatally hit by a train the night he got lost. Saroo asks to visit Guddu’s grave, but the site has been built over by developers. He learns that his father is still alive and living with his second family in Bhopal. Kallu gives Saroo a ride back to his hotel on his motorcycle. Once in his room, Saroo reflects on the events of the day, especially on Guddu’s death. Before going to bed, he sends Sue and John an update informing them that he found his birth family.
Kallu picks him up and brings him back to their mother’s house, where he meets Kallu’s wife and children. The family has tea and exchanges stories through a translator. A local news outlet descends upon Kamla’s house, followed by the national media. Saroo is surprised by the attention. Locals celebrate in the streets, while the family reconnects in private. Saroo learns that because he and Guddu vanished, Kamla was able to afford an education for Kallu and Shekila, who have become a factory manager and a teacher, respectively. The burden of being the only man in the house was difficult for Kallu to bear, especially after losing two brothers, but Saroo’s return allows Kallu’s childhood wounds to heal. Saroo also learns that he was christened Sheru, the Hindi word for ‘lion.’ Kamla tells Saroo how she struggled after being abandoned by her husband and explains that she moved to the Muslim part of town to offer him and his siblings a better life. Saroo considers looking for his father but decides against it. He spends the subsequent days getting to know his relatives and contemplating what constitutes family and home. He promises to return to Khandwa before flying back to Hobart.
Saroo’s friends are overjoyed to learn that he found his family. By contrast, his parents and Lisa are more guarded because they fear he will relocate to India. Saroo tells his story to various local, national, and international news outlets. He hires a manager to deal with requests from book publishers and film producers who contact him with offers. Media engagements follow. In the meantime, he tries to learn Hindi and keeps in touch with his Indian family via video conferencing.
Saroo returns to India in the winter, in time to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights. He continues to rekindle his relationship with his family, largely using translators. Saroo learns that his relatives did not mourn him as they did Guddu and that they always held out hope he would return. After reporting him missing, Kamla prayed and visited holy men, who told her Saroo was healthy, happy, and somewhere south of Khandwa. Instead of looking for Saroo, Kamla stayed where she was and hoped he would return. Similarly, Kallu and Shekila often thought about their lost brother and strongly believed he would come home. The family discusses how their lives have changed since Saroo’s return. Kamla fields offers from parents who want their daughters to marry Saroo, while Saroo supplements Kamla’s income. With guidance from Kallu and Shekila, Saroo also investigates buying their mother a house. Saroo’s siblings despise their father, blaming him abandoning them and for Guddu’s death. By contrast, Saroo is open to forgiving his father, who sends a message asking him to visit. Saroo postpones the visit and instead meets the man who answered his questions about Khandwa on Facebook.
While preparing for the trip, Saroo realizes that his memories of that night are not just incomplete, but also imperfect. For example, the train trip from Burhanpur to Kolkata takes at least 29 hours, nearly twice as long as he remembers traveling. In addition, the two routes to Kolkata require a transfer, but Saroo does not remember changing trains. Filled with uncertainty, he chooses the most direct route, leaving Burhanpur in a first-class compartment at 5:20 am. Saroo is alone in his compartment. Traumatic memories resurface. As fellow passengers awake in neighboring compartments, Saroo realizes that the empty train he took when he was a child was likely not servicing passengers. The landscape changes as the journey progresses. A sense of well-being comes over Saroo as he watches the sunset.
The train arrives in Kolkata the next day. Saroo stands in the middle of the busy station, just as he did as a child. He recalls pleading for help as people rushed past. The next day, Saroo meets with staff from the ISSA and thanks them for assisting him all those years ago. He learns that his adoption went through easily, but that the process has since become lengthier and more complex. He then visits the juvenile court that pronounced him an orphan and Liluah, the detention center where he was held for a month before entering the orphanage. His final stop is Howrah Bridge, the place he fled to when escaping the railway worker and his friend. The bridge is so crowded Saroo feels insignificant. He looks down to the place in the river where he twice nearly drowned, only to be saved by the same man. He then thinks of the teenaged boy who brought him to the police station. His pilgrimage complete, Saroo decides to go home.
The Epilogue centers on Sue and Kamla’s first meeting, a moment captured by 60 Minutes Australia. Although Saroo is nervous that the meeting will be awkward, he is happy to be bringing his two families together. He arrives in Ganesh Talai with Sue and the crew. Sue and Kalma embrace. Sue admires Kamla’s strength in the face of adversity, while Kamla is grateful that Sue took such good care of her son. Saroo helps Kamla financially and plans to buy her a house. He also supports the ISSA. Although Saroo has two families, he is not conflicted about his identity. Visiting India and spending time with his Indian family is both personally and culturally enriching. He enjoys learning about Indian culture and delights in his extended family, especially his nieces and nephews. Despite the challenges, Saroo does not have any regrets, as the events of his childhood shaped the course of his life.
In the closing chapters of A Long Way Home, Saroo reconnects with his Indian family and comes to terms with what happened to him as a child. Memory takes center stage as Saroo’s past and present collide. In Chapter 10, Saroo must reconcile his imperfect memories of his hometown with the real city of Khandwa. The train station is different than Saroo remembers, but he immediately finds his bearings: “From this point, I could find my way to anywhere in Khandwa. I knew where I was…and I wasn’t far from home” (194). Seeing the local mosque stirs up more childhood memories: “I had forgotten all about it! It looked similar to what I now remembered; more run-down and of course smaller, but the resemblance was still reassuring” (196). Saroo’s memories of Khandwa are those of a five-year old. Seeing it again as an adult is invariably jarring. The discrepancy between memory and reality becomes apparent when Saroo finds his old house, which now lies abandoned: “I couldn’t believe that my entire family of five—though not always at once—had occupied the tiny dark space inside. It was perhaps three meters, or nine feet square. The little fireplace was still there, clearly not used for some time, but the clay water tank was gone” (198).
The fallibility of memory is also central to Chapter 13, where Saroo recreates the long journey from Burhanpur to Kolkata. Saroo thought he spent 16 hours on the train as a child, but the trip takes approximately 29 hours:
I knew I got on the train in Burhanpur during the night, so I must have spent an additional night in transit. Maybe I slept through the entire second night. Or perhaps, as a terrified five-year-old, waking and sleeping between fits of panic and crying, I just lost track of time altogether. Either way, it was clearly a longer journey than I had remembered (219).
It is not just the duration of the trip that Saroo misremembers, but also key parts of his trajectory. Neither of the routes from Burhanpur to Kolkata are direct. Each requires a transfer, yet Saroo has no clear recollection of changing trains because his memories are those of a traumatized child. Some of Saroo’s memories are detailed and lucid, while others are mere flashes stemming from the far recesses of his mind:
As I’ve mentioned, my memories of that frightful night are not entirely clear, and sometimes I feel there are things I’ve only dimly remembered. Occasionally, I get flashes of them—so although my most prominent memory is that once I was on the train I was unable to escape it, I do have a disjointed, fragmentary image of the train at a station and my getting off it and jumping on another train. This is a flicker in the back of my mind, quite separate from my memories of the train ride, and I’m uncertain of it (240).
Although travelling to India allows Saroo to fill in some of the blanks of his imperfect memory, his memories of Guddu cannot be fleshed out. Saroo is devasted to learn that Guddu died the night he went missing. Moreover, Kamla does not have pictures of Guddu because she was too impoverished to afford family portraits. Saroo cannot even mourn his brother at his grave because the site has been built over by real estate developers. All that remains of Guddu are the family’s memories: “I felt as if my brother had been taken from me, just as I had been taken from him—disappeared without a trace […] He had been part of us as we had been part of him, and now all that remained of Guddu were our memories” (208).
Saroo uses powerful imagery to describe his impressions of India. His first stop on his way to Khandwa is the bustling city of Indore, which he describes in multisensory terms:
The sun blazed into life as the bus pulled out of the airport, and I got my first look at the pressing confusion of twenty-first-century India […] When I stepped off the bus at the hotel, the unrelenting noise of heavy traffic and the strong smell of sulfur, from drains and sewerage, hit my senses (192).
Saroo’s description of the car ride from Indore to Khandwa is equally evocative: “My short, skinny driver took to the roads like a maniac (even by the famously carefree standards of India) […] The death-defying trip couldn’t go quickly enough” (193). Language barriers stir Saroo’s emotions, reminding him of his helplessness all those years ago: “It seems a little thing to not speak the language, but it carried extra weight for a man making an emotional journey home after years of being lost. It was like being lost all over again, unable to understand what anyone said or to make people understand me” (192).
Powerful imagery also characterizes descriptions of Saroo’s emotional reunion with his Indian family. Kamla is both stunned and overjoyed to see her son after all these years: “She said as I walked toward her she had still been shaking and felt cold, with ‘the thunder in her head’ as joyful tears welled in her eyes. I had thunder in my head, too […] She said she was ‘surprised with thunder’ that her boy had come back, and that the happiness in her heart was ‘as deep as the sea’” (203). Shekila uses similarly rich language to describe her reunion with Saroo: “She said that when she had laid eyes on me again, she had been ‘lost in time,’ taken back to the days when I looked after her. She had known it was me straightaway” (216). Although the reunion is generally a happy one, Saroo is saddened not to be able to communicate directly with his loved ones: “It was bittersweet to be so close to my family and yet still cut off in this fundamental way” (206).
The closing chapters of A Long Way Home revisit the themes of fate and luck. Saroo may never have found his mother had an English-speaking man not seen him speaking to a neighbor at his mother’s old house: “I might have walked away […] I’m haunted by the possibility that I might not have [found Kamla], that we might have stood so near to each other and never known” (203). Kamla often prayed for Saroo’s return over the years. The day before he came back, she had a vision of him while praying for Allah to bless her family (232). Saroo ends Chapter 12 with an explanation of the Indian saying, “Everything is written” (236), which means that “destiny takes it inevitable path” (236). Although Saroo is not religious, he sees believes in fate and regards the unfortunate events of his childhood as the reason he is so fortunate as an adult.