After 25 years, boy finds mom via Google Earth

After 25 long years, an Indian boy was reunited with his mother, with the help of satellite images provided by Google Earth. Saroo Brierley was five years old when he got lost in 1986, while working as a sweeper on India's trains, the British Broadcasting Co. reported. "It was late at night. We got off the train, and I was so tired that I just took a seat at a train station, and I ended up falling asleep," he said. He thought his brother, who was traveling with him, would return and wake him up but when he woke, his brother was nowhere in sight. Saroo then got on a train in front of him and hoped he would meet with his brother, but ended up in Calcutta, India's third biggest city. He eventually learned to fend for himself, begging for alms until an orphanage took him in and he was adopted by the Brierleys, a couple from Tasmania, Australia in 1987. While he settled into his new home, he felt an urge to trace his birth family. But with nothing more than memories of his home, he used Google Earth in 2011 to search for where he might have been born. 'It was like being Superman' "It was just like being Superman. You are able to go over and take a photo mentally and ask, 'Does this match?' And when you say, 'No', you keep on going and going and going," he said. On the other hand, Saroo also used math to help him narrow his search. "I multiplied the time I was on the train, about 14 hours, with the speed of Indian trains and I came up with a rough distance, about 1,200 km," he said. He eventually discovered he was from Khandwa, and "navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play." Eventually he found his own home in the Ganesh Talai area, but when he got to the door he saw a lock on it. "It look old and battered, as if no-one had lived there for quite a long time," he said. A neighbor told him his family had moved, but another offered to take him to his mother. Saroo was taken to meet his mother who was nearby. At first he did not recognize her. "The last time I saw her she was 34 years old and a pretty lady, I had forgotten that age would get the better of her. But the facial structure was still there and I recognized her and I said, 'Yes, you are my mother,'" he said. "She grabbed my hand and took me to her house. She could not say anything to me. I think she was as numb as I was. She had a bit of trouble grasping that her son, after 25 years, had just reappeared like a ghost," he added. Fortune telling The BBC quoted Saroo's mother as saying that while she had long feared Saroo was dead, a fortune teller had told her she would see her son again. "I think the fortune teller gave her a bit of energy to live on and to wait for that day to come," she said. As for his big brother, Saroo said his brother was found in two pieces on a railway track a month after he got lost. His mother had never known whether foul play was involved or whether the boy had simply slipped and fallen under a train, the BBC report said. "We were extremely close and when I walked out of India the tearing thing for me was knowing that my older brother had passed away," Saroo said. Still, he said seeing his mother again and his birth family has made him sleep better. "It has taken the weight off my shoulders. I sleep a lot better now," he said. The BBC said publishers and film producers are getting interested in his incredible story and may make a film or book about his journey. — LBG/TJD, GMA News