【明報專訊】Meet Saroo Brierley in A Long Way Home, his autobiography. The 36-year-old Indian-Australian has put in words the true story of him finding his way back to his hometown in India from across the ocean with the help of his childhood memories and technology. Saroo's experience was so amazing that it was adapted into the film Lion (《漫漫回家路》), which is now showing in cinemas.

To earn money for his single-parent family, the impoverished (貧窮的) Saroo, five, occasionally goes begging with his siblings in train stations. One day he accidentally boards a train after a long wait for his elder brother. Unfamiliar with the destination he has arrived at, he tries to find his way back by taking different trains. But he ends up in a distant station. Helpless and frightened, the young child fails to recall details of his family or his hometown. That is why Saroo is taken to an organisation that looks after lost and abandoned children, where he meets the Brierleys, a middle-class Australian family that fosters (領養) him.

Saroo grows up happily under the Brierleys' care, and leads a comfortable life as a businessman after university. However, his yearning (渴望) to be reunited with his mother and siblings compels him to take action. When he is thirty, he starts using online satellite images to look for his hometown. With unflagging (不懈的) persistence, Saroo manages to locate a small town called Khandwa in central India. He then contacts people from the region on social media websites with pictures from his childhood. The family is reunited after 25 years.

As Saroo's story was widely covered in the news in 2012, he decided to write an autobiography and recorded the use of modern technology for an unusual purpose. A Long Way Home came out in June 2013. It has now been adapted into Lion, an international blockbuster. The film was nominated in six categories of the 89th Academy Awards, and it has taken more than US＄110 million worldwide at the box office.

■English highway﹕-less

An adjective can be formed by adding to a noun the suffix "-less", which means "without".

e.g. Sue volunteered to give out blankets to homeless people (people without a home).

e.g. Many agree that Hitler was a merciless ruler (a ruler without mercy).