‘Lion’ and the Child Within

I recently watched the film ‘Lion’, a dramatization of the real-life experiences of Saroo Brierley, and it broke my heart in more ways than I could have anticipated. A tragic story of a boy who becomes an orphan, it is also the story of how childhood trauma works its way into what can feel like a well-adjusted adulthood.

(This post contains many major plot details of the film—but don’t forget, I think we’re unhealthily obsessed with spoilers.)

Saroo grows up with his brother, sister, and mother in a small village in central India. His mother is a laborer, and his brother Guddu (only a child himself) provides for his family by cleaning trains during the night. Though life is hard, the film makes it clear that each member of the family loves one another, and five-year-old Saroo desperately wants to help provide for the family himself. One day he asks Guddu if he can come along with him in the night to sweep trains, and his brother begrudgingly says yes.

This does not go as planned, and Saroo finds himself alone and tired, only to sleepily wander onto a train to rest. Upon waking, the train is moving, and suddenly Saroo is hundreds of miles away from home. The child ends up in Calcutta, where the bustling city’s residents not only ignores the child asking for help, but cannot even speak his language (using Bengali instead of Hindi).

Saroo wanders the streets, desperately and futilely calling for his brother.

“Guddu,” he calls out, again and again. “Guddu!”

No response is ever given.

The child manages to escape those who would do him harm, and eventually finds someone who takes him to a police station, translating for him his requests to go home. He tells the police that his home is ‘Ginestlay’, but no such city exists, and with no way to reconnect him to his family, Saroo passes from homelessness into an orphanage, where he is eventually adopted by a family in Australia.

Twenty years later, Saroo is no longer a child, but now a young man. Looking at his life, he seems so very different from the young and lost child he once was. He finds work, love, and purpose, and anyone looking at him from the outside could never imagine his past.

Yet Saroo begins to dwell on the family that he left behind, and the brother and mother who must have no idea what happened to him. He begins to search for his family, and as the search turns into obsession, his Australian life begins to fall apart.

Trauma is an unending thing, not something that can be ‘gotten over’ or forgotten, and Saroo’s trauma makes him feel profoundly alone. No one else can share his experience, and truly understand his hurt and need for resolution. He hides his search from his adoptive parents (afraid they will feel he is ungrateful) and rejects his girlfriend (afraid that she can never truly understand his anguish). He quits his job, spirals into depression, and begins to realize that he may never find his home.

One day, by chance, he finds it, remembering details of his childhood as he journeys through India using Google Maps. The city he remembered as ‘Ginestlay’ is discovered to be ‘Ganesh Talai’, and he books a ticket home.

Miraculously, Saroo reunites with his mother, who still lived in the same village and had spent years searching for her son.

He asks after his brother, managing to choke out the name: “Guddu?”

Tragically, Guddu was killed on the same night that Saroo was lost, and the movie pauses in this moment of sorrow in the midst of joy.

It is that moment that made me remember just how little distance there is between child and adult. The man that speaks his brother’s name is the same person as the child that cried it out again and again. Though years separate the two versions of Saroo, the child is still within, traumatized and hurting.

Though it is said that ‘time heals all wounds’, I disagree. Time merely allows the wounds to fade into the background, yet they are still very much there, present, aching, and ready to jump back into the forefront of the mind if given a chance.

Charles Whitfield addresses this in his book ‘Healing the Child Within’, where he refers to our ‘child within’ as the “part of each of us which is ultimately alive, energetic, creative, and fulfilled. Who we truly are.” When that inner child is not given the care it deserves, a false self emerges, and past trauma begins to work its way to the surface. We cannot afford to let time heal our wounds, because they will only come back, again and again.

As Whitfield says:

When we are not allowed to remember, to express our feelings and to grieve or mourn our losses or traumas, whether real or threatened, through the free expression of our Child Within, we become ill.

The story of ‘Lion’ is a story of a miraculous remembering. Saroo was able to not only overcome his past but tackle it head on, battling his desire to ignore it and finding resolution. Though his ending isn’t a perfect one, he masterfully merged his past and his present in a way that many of us never can.

Saroo allowed his ‘child within’ to rise to the surface, accept the hurt, and find home.