![]() I see the sloping pavement that led to my front door, the shared playground in the mossy backyard. I can make out my driveway, and the picture is crystal clear. I just type in the exact address, and I’m taken to that congested community of townhouses in North Brunswick. When I try to find my childhood home in New Jersey, it obviously doesn’t require years of work. For those of us whose corners of the world are considered “remote” or “uncharted” from an essentialist white, Western perspective, the interface is far from seamless. But Google Earth is not a vaccine for everyone’s homesickness. It evokes childlike wonder within me I feel as if I’m an astronaut orbiting the world. When I log on to it, a cerulean blue orb pivots along an arc against a pitch-black sky dotted with stars, suggesting a reckoning with vastness. There is no denying Google Earth has a sleek, handsome interface. She hasn’t been there since her father, a widower, died nearly two decades ago she told me she has no reason to go back since his death. My mother’s home was a structure of three mud-and-brick hut-like edifices, with a garden in front and a chicken coop, but she doesn’t remember its formal address. Like Brierley with his childhood village, I remember a few landmarks from this place: a playground steps away from my grandparents’ ashram, a muddy lake, a train station. She isn’t sure how it’s spelled in English, and neither am I. ![]() Together, we try to find her village in West Bengal. I was drawn in despite myself.įor those of us whose corners of the world are considered “remote” or “uncharted” from an essentialist white, Western perspective, the interface is far from seamlessĮventually, I ended up sitting down with my mother, who was born and raised in a Bengali village three hours from Kolkata. It wasn’t often that a human interest story about someone with brown skin who speaks Hindi becomes news in the West, particularly with the added component of speaking to this era’s digital capabilities. When this story first made news in 2012 - a litany of headlines spoke breathlessly of the “miracle,” which eventually became the basis for Lion, an Oscar-nominated 2016 film - I paid close attention. There he found Fatima, who’d been looking for him for the past quarter century. Though he had only vague memories of his ancestral village’s surroundings - one was of a water tank near the train station where he lost his brother - they were enough to allow him to scatterplot surrounding landmarks on Google Earth over a period of years and eventually find his home village. Certain triggers reminded him of India: the hum of a Bollywood song, the smell of an Indian dessert frying atop a stove. From there, two white Australian nationals adopted him and brought him to Tasmania, and as he grew older, time scrubbed his memory clean of his mother tongue, Hindi, replacing it with English.Īs a college student, though, Brierley found himself burdened with a homesickness he couldn’t explain. Brierley ended up in Kolkata, more than 900 miles away, where he made his way to an orphanage. But only after the sun came up did he realize he’d boarded a freight train bound for an unknown destination. In a daze, he boarded a train lodged at the station, thinking his brother was on there. Brierley fell asleep on a bench at a train station, and when he woke up, he was alone. It was their way of helping out their single mother, Fatima, then struggling to make enough money for the family to survive. That was the year he and his brother boarded a train to the city of Burhanpur, 45 miles south of Ganesh Talai, to look for spare change underneath seats. Born in the village of Ganesh Talai in central India as Sheru Munshi Khan, he was just five years old in 1986. In 2011, Saroo Brierley found his way home.
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