BOOK REVIEW: A Long Way Home – Review by Stephanie Cole Jehl

PHOTO BY ALEIGHSA WRIGHT

Stephanie received a Ph.D. in microbiology and molecular genetics from Harvard Medical School. Her passion for global health has taken her across the world, from working in a children’s hospital in Cambodia to the University of Havana in Cuba. Panama City Beach native, Stephanie has since returned to the Gulf Coast, where she built an analytical laboratory for a local brewery and is currently raising two young daughters with her husband Scott and volunteering at a free medical clinic. Stephanie’s earliest memories include always having her nose in a book—preferably a travel memoir from some hidden corner of the planet.

REVIEW

On the surface, “A Long Way Home” (2013) by Saroo Brierley is a miraculous, true account of one young man’s determination to find the place he was born. At its core, Saroo’s work is an exploration of the factors that influence our self-identity and the oftentimes evolving meaning of the word “home.”

In rural India, a 5-year-old boy, Saroo, boards an empty train car while searching for his older brother. He falls asleep and the train departs with young Saroo locked inside, setting off a chain of events that would see him swept across the Indian subcontinent, separated from his family, and surviving for weeks on the streets of Calcutta, before being adopted by a couple in Australia. Saroo doesn’t know his last name, much less the name of his hometown. Yet, 25 years later, he finds his way back.

Saroo’s memoir seamlessly drifts between his years coming of age as a typical boy in Australia and his memories of India, where he lived in a state of constant hunger with his mother and siblings in a one-room shack, “a precarious structure with a cowpat floor that was always falling apart a little—my brothers and I would sometimes pull out a brick and peer outside for fun before putting it back.” Although immensely happy with his second chance at life in Australia, for 25 years Saroo mentally replayed the walk through his childhood neighborhood to his home, almost as a meditation, in case he ever got the chance to trace his footsteps.

The search for his family—and ultimately his self-identity—begins unexpectedly during college when he befriends a group of Indian students in Australia. Among other factors, his inability to speak with them in Hindi, his native language, sparks an internal debate about his sense of self. “For the first time I was stripped of my ‘Indianness.’ I was the Australian among the Indians,” he writes. Growing up, Saroo often hesitated to relate the story of how he came to live in Australia to others, because he felt it changed people’s view of him from “Saroo” to “Saroo-who-used-to-live-on-the-streetsof-Calcutta.” By the last chapter he writes, “I am not conflicted about who I am or where to call home.
I have two families, not two identities. I am Saroo Brierley.”

Having traveled to India the year before this book was released, I was naturally drawn to Saroo’s story—I just had to know how a person could even begin a search for a nondescript neighborhood in a crowded, disorienting country more than one-third the size of the United States. Today, as we witness the struggle of displaced and separated people both abroad and here in the U.S., Saroo’s memoir is a timely read on the complexities of the immigrant experience and its influence on self-identity.

“A Long Way Home” is a heartwarming, adventurous story that reminds us that the definition of “home” is, for many of us, more than any one place.