And when I realised how wonderful he was, I knew that he must have been loved. “Right from when I first adopted Saroo,” Sue says, “I was aware that that he was born to another woman. But the story is so compelling and uplifting, that we decided to do it, and share our knowledge.” We were then asked by several publishing companies, if we would like to write a book, and we thought about the fact that it is such a private story. And then when I returned to Australia it just snowballed. “We were inundated with news-crews from Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai…and before we knew it, the story had spread all over India. When Saroo eventually returned to India, he had to use an interpreter to communicate with his mother, Fatima, but he also discovered that the local police had alerted the media. I couldn’t even string a sentence together.” My visual sense were heightened, but I never went to school, so I only knew a few words. Saroo takes over to talk about telling his story, saying, “It wasn’t until I learnt the English language that I was able to tell the story of what really happened. Seven months later we had Saroo offered to us, and we were over the moon.” But then, after sixteen years, there was a window of opportunity when the law changed, which we jumped at. At that time, adoption was only for infertile couples, which was not something we could prove, so we just set about living our lives. At twenty-one, when John and I moved into the home that we built together, we just naturally assumed that we would be able to pursue this.
“I had never really considered being a biological mother, for various reasons,” Sue says. In town for the South Australian premiere, Saroo and his mother Sue, took some time out to chat to Glam Adelaide over a plate of noodles. The story is told in Saroo Brierley book A Long Way Home, which is the basis for the extraordinary film Lion, now showing in cinemas. Having adopted a child from India named Saroo, twenty-five years later, they would return to find his birth parents. All families have their stories but few have a story quite like that of the Brierley family.
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