There aren’t many success stories amongst the street children of Kolkata. Certainly not on the scale of Saroo Brierley, whose book was turned into the movie Lion, tipped for Oscar glory this weekend. It’s a story so moving that even hard bitten hacks at the private screening I went to were suspiciously red-eyed as the credits rolled. It has since captivated audiences worldwide - because it’s all true.
Starring Nicole Kidman and Dev Patel, Lion tells Saroo’s own incredible life story. Born into an impoverished family in rural India, his mother laboured in a quarry carrying rocks. They had barely enough to eat and as a small child he used to ride local trains with his older brother begging for food or a few rupees. One night, aged just five years-old he got separated and rode on a train to Kolkata, 1000 kilometers away, landing in the city’s Howrah railway station - the biggest in India and home to hundreds of the city’s abandoned kids.
He couldn’t speak Bengali, and didn’t know his village name, so faced the perils of life on the street alone, until he was adopted by an Australian family. Fast forward 25 years and Saroo, a young adult in Tasmania, uses newly invented Google Earth to search for the village he remembers as a child and eventually is reunited with the family he lost.
It’s not hard to see why this extraordinary tale has been made into a Hollywood movie, but for Theresa Godly, 42, an actor from Walton-upon-Thames, it struck a particularly heartbreaking chord.
Born on the streets of Kolkata on 26th December 1974, Theresa was handed to Shishu Bhavan, the Missionaries of Charity orphanage, just a few days later. She still has her adoption papers, signed by Mother Theresa. She knows a little about her Anglo-Indian birth mother, Yvonne, including, she thinks, her late husband’s last name: Fernandez. She had been widowed, she was destitute and living on the streets, she may have been forced to become a sex worker or been a victim of rape.