She converted to Islam and changed her name from Kamla to Fatima.
In a whirlwind romance rare in tradition-bound India, they fell in love and got married. She caught the eye of her supervisor, an orphan himself. As a teenager, she moved into a construction job, carrying cement in a broad bowl balanced on her head above her petite but sturdy frame. Neighbors slipped her and her four siblings scraps. She waded into fieldwork, harvesting crops to survive. At the age of 10, she was sentenced to one of the most miserable of fates in rural India: That of an orphan girl, with no family to offer support or protection, nobody to arrange her marriage or pay her dowry. She was born to landless Hindu peasants who worked as near-slaves in others' fields until her father was killed by a heart attack and her mother died a few months later in childbirth. They should have been back hours earlier.įatima lived for her children. When she returned to her cramped house after a hard day of work on a construction site, her two young sons still hadn't arrived. The train was thundering down the track toward a destination - and a destiny - unknown.įatima Munshi was frantic. Outside the window, the remains of his old life had faded into the distance. Only the relentless hum of the train answered his cries. "MA!" he screamed, wild with fear as he ran up and down the empty compartment, tears streaming down his face. In the beginning, though, all Saroo knew was that nothing was as it should be. Events that would spark the determined hunt of a mother for her son and a son for his mother, brought together only to realize that you can never really go home again. He wouldn't know for decades that this fateful train ride was setting into motion a chain of events both fantastic and horrific - events that would tear him away from his family and join him with a new one.
Soon, he would find himself alone in the world. It was 1987 and Saroo knew only that he was alone on the train. His brother should have been there, sweeping under the seats for loose change.
And the alien landscape flashing past the window looked nothing like home.
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