In 1986, a five-year-old boy named Saroo went out with his older brother Guddu near their hometown of Khandwa in central India. The brothers were poor, often riding trains to nearby towns to look for food and dropped coins. At a station in Burhanpur, Guddu told Saroo to wait on a bench while he went off to work. Saroo, exhausted, fell asleep.

When he woke up, Guddu was gone. Saroo wandered onto a nearby empty train carriage, half expecting to find his brother inside. Instead, the doors closed, and the train started moving. He was trapped.

He rode that train for what he believes was around two days, alone, terrified, with no idea where he was going. When it finally stopped, he was in Calcutta, now Kolkata, roughly 1,000 miles from home in a city of millions where he didn’t speak the language. He couldn’t tell anyone the name of his town. He was five and couldn’t read.

What he didn’t know, and wouldn’t learn for 25 years, was that Guddu had been killed on the train tracks that same night.

Saroo survived three weeks on the streets of Calcutta before ending up in an orphanage. There, an Australian couple, Sue and John Brierley, adopted him and brought him home to........

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