WHAT IS POVERTY LIKE FOR SAROO'S FAMILY?

A Long Way Home, a memoir by Saroo Brierly, suggests that poverty has many forms, and the hunger caused by poverty can exist in the body, the heart, or both.

Most people see having little money to buy material possessions, such as the latest cell phone, as poverty. Real poverty, however, is knowing physical hunger. People can live without possessions and shelter, but there are basic necessities that the body must have to live. For example, Saroo does without shelter when he spends the night on the street in Calcutta, but he must have food and water.

As a part of his biological, Indian family, Saroo was always physically hungry. As an adult, he remembers the feeling of hunger more than anything else in childhood. Each day was spent looking for something to eat. He and his siblings begged, scrounged, stole, and scavenged to find food. They also took on menial jobs whenever and wherever they could to earn money for food. Kamla, their mother, took on work and earned only $1.30 each day to feed the family.

Saroo’s older brothers, Guddu and Kallu, would leave home for days at a time to relieve pressure on their mother and siblings, and to find food to bring back to the family. Saroo’s entire family life revolved around love, loyalty, and a desperation to survive by avoiding starvation.

As an adult, Brierly's heart is feeling impoverished because he is separated from his birth mother and his birth place. Though his adoptive mother and father are wonderful people who love him and take care of the physical hunger that he felt earlier in his life, they are unable to satisfy his heart's hunger to return to his childhood home. He decides to take the journey back to ease the poverty/hunger in his heart.

While Saroo feels a physical hunger stemming from monetary poverty in his childhood and an emotional poverty later as an adult, his mother has felt both types of poverty all of her life. When Saroo visits his birth mother many years later, she is doing slightly better than when he was a child. However, she still lives in squalid surroundings. Her home consists of little more than one large room, and her work still earns her a pittance. She still struggles for food. Her heart has been impoverished since Saroo left her and his birth place. Thus, she has known both kinds of poverty.

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