I just watched the movie Lion (2016). And I couldn’t help but cry my absolute heart out. That little boy just acted so beautifully. Dev Patel, too. Nicole Kidman. Everybody. But the boy! The boy haunts me. Those big, brown, sad eyes. Lost in a terrifying, unfriendly world… I’ll end with some spoilers to the plot, by the way. It’s a true story. And quite a story it is.
The whole “what if”, the haunting memories, the questions, gone unanswered for decades. To be adopted by sweet parents. And yet not being whole. When the boy, by that time in the movie a man, talked to his adoptive mother. And he told her: “When you adopted us, you did not adopt blank slates… you adopted us, and you adopted our past, too…”
The two brothers on the railroad track. Big brother looking out for his little brother, so well. Mother has to work. Imagine being five years old and having to look after your baby sister. At the same time, your twelve year old brother is responsible for you, as mother hauls rocks and father is nowhere to be seen, may have left, or passed away. When that beautiful little boy you just desperately wish for him to find some kindness in the world. But for weeks he has to fend for himself on the street, dismissed, callously, by whoever he meets. He has to run for his life. Kind strangers aren’t all that kind. The orphanage just another dark and scary place.
One moment your brother does not pay attention. Just one moment. He leaves you at a bench at the railway station. He has to. He needs to work. Do a quick job. Earn some money, or else you starve. You doze off… wake up… and he isn’t there. You look for him in a train, and get locked inside and driven across India, sixteen-hundred miles away.
The feeling of being incomplete is so beautifully portrayed. The search for your family. Being torn, also, between loyalty for your adoptive parents, and your birth mother and siblings. You are afraid you may be seen as “ungrateful” for even searching your birth family… so you search in secret. You never tell a soul. Not until right before you fly out and finally, after years of searching, having located your original village. For a multitude of personal reasons the movie hit me terribly hard. But I figure it’d hit anyone with even half a beating heart…
What truly killed me was the moment he finally found his mother. His sister. But his big brother wasn’t there — the night the little boy got lost on the station, his brother was hit by a train nearby and died. His mother lost two sons that night and he never knew. Then they show the two brothers playfully walking the train tracks and I burst into tears.
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