Saroo escapes into the station throng but is lost in a strange city where no one speaks his native Hindi. After two days the train ended up in faraway Calcutta – 1500km from Khandwa. Saroo could not escape from an empty locked cabin and his calls for help at stations were unheeded. When he woke up his brother was gone and the train is moving. The pair got separated and Saroo fell asleep on a train.

One night Guddu and Saroo travelled to a nearby city on a train where Guddu earned money working as a sweeper. Saroo’s older brother Guddu supplemented their income by stealing coal from trains to sell for food and would take five-year-old Saroo with him on adventures. His father had left home and the desperately poor family relied on the money his mother made from carrying rocks from a quarry. Saroo Brierley was born in 1981 in a small village near the Central Indian city of Khandwa. Lion tells an incredible true story and it has been turned into one of the best Australian films in years. My eyes are capable of betraying me again at the memory the following morning. I was annoyed at myself, knowing full well my emotions were being played on by the filmmakers but like my own mother all those years ago, I could not help myself. Mum has been dead ten years now but I remembered her and her tears as I watched the first meeting of a man and his mother in 25 years at the end of Lion.

“Stop it, you” she would say to me while drying her tears, her anger at me betrayed by a smile. I’ve always hating crying at the movies ever since I was kid and used to laugh at my mum when she cried at the drop of a hat in any emotional scene of a movie, no matter how silly the premise. I hate to admit it but I shed tears while watching the new film Australian film Lion.

Lion in hindi is called saroo