Family Theme Analysis

A Long Way Home tells the story of Saroo Brierley, an Australian man who was adopted from India when he was a child. At five years old, Saroo boarded a train from his hometown in rural India with his older brother, Guddu. Due to a misunderstanding, Saroo ended up taking a solo 24-hour journey all the way to Calcutta, where he spent weeks begging and living on the streets before being taken into custody and eventually adopted. As an adult, Saroo spends years using the internet to find his birth family and hometown, and finally returns to India to meet his birth mother when he's 30. Saroo is extremely clear that being adopted doesn't make his ties to his adoptive parents any weaker or any different than those between biological children and their parents. Similarly, he insists that being raised by his adoptive parents doesn't diminish his love for his birth mother. In this way, Saroo's memoir proposes first and foremost that there's no one "correct" way for families to look and instead, suggests that how families behave with each other and care for each other is far more meaningful than simply sharing blood.

Saroo begins by describing the way he grew up in India with his birth mother, Kamla, his older brothers Guddu and Kallu, and his baby sister, Shekila. While Kamla is Hindu, Saroo's birth father is Muslim, and after taking a second wife, he distances himself from Kamla and her children, and is at times violent and abusive towards her. Saroo and his siblings have little contact with their father throughout their childhoods because of this. This then stands as an early influence on Saroo's later belief that blood and marriage are inadequate or incomplete signifiers of family, since his father seldom does anything to support his children with Kamla. Later, as Saroo explains his adoptive parents' reason for choosing to adopt rather than have biological children, he cites a similarly abusive relationship as a major influence on his parents' decision. Mum's father, Josef, was a World War Two veteran who suffered from shellshock and alcoholism and was a terrifying person to be around—so much so that Mum never even introduces Saroo and his brother, Mantosh, to their grandfather. Growing up with a father who was so frightening impressed upon Mum that simply sharing blood with Josef didn't make him family, given that he never acted in a way that made her feel safe, loved, or even capable of trusting men as a whole. Because of this, when Mum did marry Dad, she'd already decided that there was "nothing sacrosanct about families formed only by birth parents."

When Saroo describes his childhood in Australia, he explains that he bonded quickly with his parents, and for the most part led what he considers to be a normal childhood. However, this doesn't dull his curiosity about his birth family and the bond he still feels with Kamla and his siblings, and it's this bond that inspires him to spend his twenties searching off and on for his hometown and Kamla. However, Saroo is very clear that his quest for his birth family isn't an attempt to delegitimize, discredit, or replace the sense of family he feels with Mum, Dad, and Mantosh. Instead, finding them was a way for him to better understand himself and where he came from, including the circumstances surrounding his adoption. Indeed, he states that reconnecting didn't change his identity—he still thinks of himself as Saroo Brierley and an Australian. He writes that finding his birth family simply gave him a second set of people to call family and treat kindly, generously, and respectfully, just as Mum and Dad treated him when they adopted him.

Taken together, the way that Saroo manages to feel at home in both of his families, as well as the fact that Mum, Dad, and Kamla are all endlessly thankful for the ways that their connections to Saroo afford them a much larger familial support network, shows clearly that family absolutely does not need to consist of just two parents and biological children. All of the members of Saroo's family, both Indian and Australian, manage to create families that are strong and loving, despite and even because of the terrible circumstances that have torn them apart and brought them closer together. Ultimately, Saroo insists that a sense of care and the unbreakable bonds that he experiences with both of his mothers are what creates a family, not blood.