The movie, ‘Lion,’ was released in 2016 and was successful financially and in popularity and was nominated for numerous Academy Awards in U.S. The movie is based on fact. A little boy, maybe five years old, is separated (by accident) from his older brother, about fourteen, at a train station in their native India and becomes lost. Little boy, named Saru,¹ boards a train, looking for elder brother (named Guddu) and ends up almost a thousand miles away from his home village (Ganesh Talai) in city of Calcutta, where he is sent to an orphanage and adopted by an Australian couple, after attempts to find Saru’s natural family failed.

Saru grew to be a man in Australia, in island state Tasmania, but never forgot his native land or his first family, his mother and siblings, especially older brother, Guddu. They had been a very poor family, but had much love between them.

Saru became Saroo Brierley in Australia, where he was raised in a loving family, parents Sue and John, and another Indian boy they adopted, Mantosh. At age of thirty, with the help of his Mum, friends, wall-maps and internet resources over the years, Saroo identified his home village as part of Indian city Khandwa and made plans to return there to find his birth-mother, Kamla and brothers and sister. In 2012, Saroo traveled to India and found Kamla and siblings. In 2013, Saroo authored a book about his experiences, A Long Way Home (title changed to Lion). Saroo’s birth-mother, Kamla, 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’.”²

Death, Loss and Mourning

Amidst the joy and accompanying emotions of reuniting with his original family after twenty-five years, Saroo received “the hardest news I’d ever hear. When I asked my mother about [Guddu], she replied sadly, ‘he is no longer’.”³ In the movie, a man nearby translates, “Guddu is no more. He is with . . . God.”

“Guddu had also never returned that night I was lost. My mother found out a few weeks later that he had died in a train accident at age fourteen. She had lost two sons on the same night. I couldn’t imagine how she had borne it.”⁴

“A few weeks, possibly a month, after our disappearance, a policeman came to the house. He said that Guddu had died in a railway accident and showed her a photo of his body. Guddu was found by the tracks about a kilometer outside Burhanpur (this was the station where the brothers were separated), and the policeman was there to ask her to formally identify him. Half of one of his arms had been severed and he had lost one of his eyes–an unimaginably horrific thing for a mother to have to look at.”⁵

“I wanted to visit Guddu’s grave, but my family told me that wasn’t possible–houses had been built over the graveyard he was in.. We didn’t even have any photographs of Guddu, as we could never afford family portraits. He had been part of us as we had been part of him, and now all that remained of Guddu were our memories.”⁶

“I wasn’t sure if my family entirely understood why I was so upset.. For them, Guddu’s death was long in the past, but for me his death happened suddenly that very day. Not being able to properly grieve for my departed brother was a deep-seated loss that I felt strongly long after I returned to Australia. The last thing he said to me on that platform in Burhanpur was that he would be back. Perhaps he’d never returned; perhaps he’d come back to find me gone. Either way, I’d hoped to be able to be reunited with him. Now I’ll never know what happened that night–some of our mysteries will never be solved.”⁷

Mysteries incapable of solution are profound things, things to ponder, and death is one of them.

Conclusion

The film goes surreal in its penultimate scene showing the Saroo character walking on the local train tracks with changing expressions on his face looking ahead, until forthwith his fourteen year old brother, Guddu, appears. Guddu looks at Saroo seriously for some moments, then smiles and tells him “come on.” Next, you see the two brothers, Guddu and Saru (now five years old again) walking and playing along the tracks. This is memory and it is surreal. It can’t be real, can it?

When a loved one dies, is lost, the interchange of memory and present sadness makes up what is called mourning. A person recalls experiences, times together with the dead one, when that one was living. In spirit, the memory transforms the mourner back into past times in an effort toward understanding and some happiness.

Mourning is a special state to be in. Memories of the past with the dead one are tinged with emotion.

According to Jesus of Nazareth, “blessed are they that mourn” (Mt. 5:4), which means the living and the dead are included together in a specially good way or connection.

Saroo’s book is dedicated “for Guddu.”

Notes

1. ‘Saru’ was the young boy’s mispronunciation of his actual name, ‘Sheru,’ meaning, ‘lion.’ See, Saroo Brierley (with Larry Buttrose), Lion (NY: NAL, 2013), p. 201
2. Ibid., p. 202
3. Ibid., p. 206
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 206f
6. Ibid., p. 208
7. Ibid.