lost and found

(Reading; pt 2)
photo: bbcSaroo was only five years old when he got lost. He was travelling with his older brother, working as a sweeper on India's trains. "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."

1.. "I thought my brother would come back and wake me up but when I awoke he was nowhere to be seen. I saw a train in front of me and thought he must be on that train. So I decided to get on it and hoped that I would meet my brother." Saroo did not meet his brother on the train. Instead, he fell asleep and had a shock when he woke up 14 hours later. Though he did not realise it at first, he had arrived in Calcutta, India's third biggest city and notorious for its slums. read on

choose from A-H, there is one extra.
A Incredibly, he soon discovered what he was looking for.
B But the facial structure was still there.
C Saroo settled down well.
D He had always been easy going.
E All he had to go on were his vivid memories
F That nap would determine the rest of his life.
G But it was not what he had hoped for.
H You could not trust anyone.

Soon he was sleeping rough. "It was a very scary place to be." He became a beggar, one of the many children begging on the streets of the city. "I had to be quite careful. 2.." But in the end, he did get off the streets.

He was taken in by an orphanage, which put him up for adoption. He was adopted by the Brierleys, a couple from Tasmania. "I accepted that I was lost and that I could not find my way back home, so I thought it was great that I was going to Australia." 3. .

But as he got older the desire to find his birth family became increasingly strong. The problem was that as an illiterate five-year-old he had not known the name of the town he had come from. 4. . So he began using Google Earth to search for where he might have been born.

Eventually Saroo hit on a more effective strategy. "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 1,200km."
He drew a circle on a map with its centre in Calcutta, with its radius about the distance he thought he had travelled. 5. . Khandwa. "When I found it, I zoomed down and bang, it just came up. I navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play."

Soon he made his way to Khandwa, the town he had discovered online. He found his way around the town with his childhood memories. Eventually he found his own home in the neighbourhood of Ganesh Talai. 6. . "When I got to the door I saw a lock on it. It look old and battered, as if no-one had lived there for quite a long time." Saroo had a photograph of himself as a child and he still remembered the names of his family. A neighbour said that his family had moved. Saroo was taken to meet his mother who was nearby. At first he did not recognise 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. 7. . I recognised her and said, "Yes, you are my mother."

bbc



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