Dev Patel brings true story of Saroo Brierley to life

Dev Patel says the story of Saroo Brierley is one he most identifies with as an actor. Photo / AP

The story of Saroo Brierley, told in his 2013 memoir A Long Way Home and in the new film Lion, is hard to believe. In 1986, finding himself separated from his older brother - after they had travelled from their small Indian town to a train station several miles away to scrounge for change - the 5-year-old panicked, jumping into an empty train car to look for his teenage sibling.

When that train started moving - and didn't stop for 32 hours - the child was carried nearly 1000 miles (1600km) away, to Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), where he survived on the streets for three weeks before being picked up by authorities.

He didn't know his mother's given name or even his own last name. He spoke Hindi and was unable to communicate with the parade of Bengali-speaking officials who tried to help him. And the name of the place where he kept telling them he lived - Ganesh Talai, a neighbourhood in the town of Khandwa - was unrecognisable. Eventually, the boy was put up for adoption and taken in by an Australian couple, Sue and John Brierley of Tasmania, where he was raised.

That's not even the incredible part.

In his mid-20s, after learning of the virtual 3D mapping programme Google Earth, Brierley began searching online for images that might correspond with his fragmentary memories of the town where he last saw his brother: a water tower near a highway overpass, visible from the station platform; a nearby ravine; and a place name that began with the letter "B". Guessing that he could have been on the train for as long as 24 hours, and multiplying that number by the speed of Indian passenger trains in the 1980s, Brierley was able to narrow his search to a specific radius around Kolkata. After several years of painstaking searching, Brierley found what looked to be an exact match: Bhuranpur, and the town of Khandwa, a short distance away. In 2012, Brierley travelled there, ultimately tracking down his mother, who had never given up hope.

Neither had he.

Actor Dev Patel, who plays the adult Saroo in Lion in a passionate, grounded performance that has generated awards buzz, described capturing what he called Brierley's "unflinching drive", as well as the extraordinary feat of memory that it entailed.

"I think Saroo should be studied scientifically," Patel says, noting that, for many who have suffered that kind of childhood trauma, memories become harder to recall, not easier.

The real Saroo Brierley, now 35, sounded surprisingly blas about his extraordinary ability for recollection, saying it wasn't all that difficult to dredge up images of where he came from - his earliest memories, he says, date to when he was 3 years old - because those images had never left him. "I had been saying to myself, since childhood, 'I will never forget the place where I was born'," he says. "That's my identity. If I lose that, I lose everything."

To the degree that Brierley comes across as preternaturally mellow, centred and self-confident, given all that he has been through, Patel was, by his own admission, a strange casting choice. The actor, who is known for what he calls "screwball comedies" such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, describes himself as "fidgety and hyperactive" by nature.

"I'm a big, loud Labrador-esque type of creature," he says. Although he has played characters who spend a lot of time in front of computer screens - notably in the sci-fi thriller Chappie - portraying someone with the "intense reserve" of Brierley did not come naturally.

Patel also put on about 9kg, grew his hair out and learned an Australian accent.

Although the 26-year-old actor says the part was "one of the biggest transformations I've ever had to make on screen," he also says the role of Saroo - and his journey to reconnect with his heritage - was "one of the most similar characters to me I ever played."

As the child of Indian parents growing up in London, Patel says he "did everything I could to fit in, which sometimes meant shunning your heritage. When I went to India to do Slumdog [Millionaire], for the first time as a conscious adult, I fell in love with it. I felt more whole, as a human being."

Brierley says he can relate to that characterisation. One scene in the movie features Saroo having a flashback, triggered by a plate of jalebi, a fried-dough treat from his childhood that Brierley says his family could rarely afford.

Although that Proustian moment really happened, Brierley says there were frequently other such flashbacks - not shown in the film - triggered by seeing something as simple as a mother and child on the streets of Tasmania. He speaks of reconnecting with his mother as a form of "healing his dreams" but shrugs off the suggestion that a more traditional form of therapy might have helped him.

"I never thought that I needed that kind of stuff," he says. "Everyone goes through things. It just happens that I went through something that no child should ever have to go through."