Survival, Poverty, and Childhood Theme Analysis

As Saroo describes his early childhood in India, he poignantly asserts that growing up hungry and in poverty fundamentally shapes people's lives and can have a brutal effect on their childhoods. He recalls in horrific detail how little his family had to eat, as well as the risks he took to steal scraps of food whenever he could. However awful growing up in poverty was, however, Saroo also links the skills he developed during his early childhood to the reason he later survived for weeks in Calcutta. Essentially, Saroo suggests that his survival was a result of having been, in many ways, very much not a child thanks to his experiences of poverty.

Saroo and his siblings are extremely isolated as children, in part because of Saroo's birth family's poverty, and in part because of their unconventional religious makeup (Kamla is Hindu, while Saroo's birth father is Muslim, though Kamla raises her children in a Muslim neighborhood and has them undergo Muslim traditions such as circumcision). This combination of isolation and poverty means that all of Kamla's children develop a strong sense of independence at a very young age. Saroo, for example, is put in charge of watching his baby sister Shekila when he's around three years old while Kamla spends days at a time away, working on construction sites. Because Saroo is allowed this responsibility and because it's also culturally acceptable for him to leave Shekila unattended for hours at a time, he spends a great deal of time wandering the streets alone, begging for food and stealing when he can. This teaches him the skills he later uses to feed himself as a lone child in Calcutta, as he's already an adept thief, used to being constantly hungry, and used to functioning without adult guidance or supervision. The amount of time Saroo spends alone on the streets also affords him finely tuned street smarts—essentially, he understands how to both gauge which vendor stalls or individuals will be the best targets to steal from, as well as identify individuals that may seem kindly at first glance, but actually mean to hurt him. This later proves to be one of the most important skills that Saroo develops. When a kindly railway worker takes Saroo in, promising to introduce him to a friend who will help, Saroo instinctively understands upon meeting the "friend" that there's something amiss—and his instincts are proven correct when several railway workers angrily pursue him when he escapes.

As street smart and as used to poverty as Saroo is, his experiences in Calcutta impress upon both him and the reader how tenuous the "positive" aspects of poverty that help Saroo survive truly are. The two nights that Saroo spends in the railway workers' shack begin immediately to break down his willingness to sleep on the streets, which in turn leaves him far more willing to trust the actually kind mother who takes him in for a night, as well as the teenager who later turns him in to the police. This breaking down of his survival skills reinforces for the reader that as smart and adult as Saroo may seem as he traverses Calcutta's streets, he is indeed still a child—and that care and food are enough to, in some ways, return him to a state of being truly a child once more, no matter his experiences.

Though Saroo credits his survival to his experiences with poverty, he's also very careful to remind the reader on multiple occasions that he was one of the lucky ones. His street smarts certainly helped him, but his survival was much more the work of chance and dumb luck, and his story isn't intended to be taken as a sweeping representation of childhood poverty in India. Saroo explains that in 1987, the year he was adopted, 14 million Indian children died of starvation or illness. He also notes that even today, a horrific number of lone children from Indian streets are trafficked into slavery, both sexual and otherwise, or even sold for their organs by people like the railway workers' friend. With this, Saroo suggests that his experiences of childhood poverty were certainly a contributing factor in his survival, but the same absolutely cannot be said for all children. For him, adulthood is a privileged state that means he survived his childhood—a privilege that is denied to many Indian children.