A Long Way Home (Reading by Paragraph)

Front

Tell about Saroo's childhood

Back

Born in India, separated from family

Front

Tell about Saroo's Adoption

Back

Australian couple adopted Saroo

Front

Q2: Why does the narrator consider Birampur in Uttar Pradesh, and what conclusion does he reach?


If Byron wasn’t home, I might spend a couple of hours musing

over the various “B” towns1

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.

Back

He considers it because its name fits the “B” towns pattern, but he concludes it is impossible since it is too far from Kolkata and lacks a train station.

Front

Q1: How does Saroo’s use of first-person narration affect the way readers connect with his memories of India?

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.

Back

It makes the account more personal and emotional, allowing readers to feel his uncertainty and longing directly.

Front

Question:
What landmarks does Saroo remember that help him feel he could recognize his hometown?

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

Back

Answer:
He recalls the bridge over the river where he played as a child, the nearby dam wall, and the train station along with the route from it to his house.

Front

Question:
What specific landmarks does Saroo recall about the “B” station where he boarded the train?

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.

Back

He remembers the station building with only a couple of tracks, a large water tank on a tower, a pedestrian overpass across the tracks, and a small gorge the train crossed just before entering the town.

Front

10
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.
Question:
Why does Saroo describe his search as becoming clearer and more deliberate at this point in the story?

Back

He realizes that instead of being overwhelmed by what he didn’t know, he could focus on what he did remember and approach the search step by step. With time, patience, and the help of Google Earth, he saw the task as both an intellectual challenge and an emotional quest, which gave him renewed determination.

Front

11
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.

Question:
How long did Saroo estimate he had traveled on the train, and how did he calculate the distance?

Back

Saroo estimated he traveled 12–15 hours overnight, covering about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) based on train speed.

Front

12
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.
Question:
How did Saroo use Google Earth to narrow down his search, and which regions of India did this include?

Back

Saroo used Google Earth to mark a 1,000‑kilometer boundary from Kolkata, focusing on nearby Indian states while ruling out Bangladesh since he spoke Hindi, not Bengali.

Front

13
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,5

I could concentrate on picking through a manageable portion and set it aside if it proved empty
Question:
What challenge did Saroo face when defining his search area, and how did he view the task despite its size?

Back

Saroo faced searching over 962,000 square kilometers with 345 million people, but felt progress by narrowing the field step by step.