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 Hobart, Tasmania. “Saroo’s arrival was a kind of birth into our family,” Sue Brierley told PEOPLE in 2017. “It was just a fantastic moment, filled with love and joy.” He grew up loved, safe, and an ocean away from everything he’d lost. But the memories never left. He could still picture the layout of his neighborhood, a water tower, a pedestrian bridge, a ravine near his home. He could even half-remember the name of his suburb, though as a small child he’d only ever known it as something that sounded like “Ginestlay.” Then came Google Earth. Brierley began doing the math. He knew roughly how long he’d been on that train and how fast Indian trains traveled, which gave him a rough search radius around Kolkata. Then, he started scanning methodically, obsessively, following rail lines outward from the city, looking for the specific landmarks burned into his memory. He spent years at it. On March 31, 2011, it happened. He found a town that looked achingly familiar, and beside it a small suburb whose name finally clicked: Ganesh Talai. Not “Ginestlay.” A child’s mangled version of a real place. The water tower was there. The bridge was there. It was home. His adoptive family backed him completely. “If he wanted to explore that,” Sue said, “we wanted him to be fully happy about his identity.” In February 2012, Brierley flew to India and made his way to Ganesh Talai. He walked to the house he remembered, but his family was gone. A short distance away, he found three women standing outside. The one in the middle stepped forward. He knew immediately. So did she. It was his mother, Kamla Munshi, who had converted to Islam and taken the name Fatima after he disappeared. She had never given up hope that her lost son was alive. They embraced in the street and held on, surrounded by neighbors, in what Brierley would later call the most pivotal moment of his life. She took his hand, led him inside, and began calling his surviving siblings to tell them the impossible news. It was in that reunion that Saroo finally asked the question that had no good answer. Where was Guddu? His mother’s eyes filled with tears. His brother had been found dead on the train tracks about a month after Saroo vanished. In the span of a few weeks all those years ago, Fatima had lost two sons. Now, one of them was standing in her home, a grown man with an Australian accent. A year later, Sue Brierley traveled to India to meet Fatima. With a translator bridging the gap between the two women who had each, in their own way, been Saroo’s mother, the moment was almost too big to hold. “The earth seemed to be sort of moving,” Sue said. “I started to cry, and she hugged me. She said through the translator, ‘He’s your son now. I give my son to you.’ We stood there for quite a while, just the three of us holding each other. Suddenly there was no noise. There was only our breathing.” Brierley still keeps in close touch with Fatima, visits regularly, and bought her a house. Saroo told his whole story in his memoir A Long Way Home, which was adapted into the 2016 film Lion, with Dev Patel playing the adult Saroo and Nicole Kidman as Sue Brierley. The film earned six Academy Award nominations. But the version on the page and the screen both come back to the same nearly unbelievable core: a frightened five-year-old memorized the shape of his home, carried it across an ocean and a quarter of a century, and then, with a satellite’s eye and a staggering amount of patience, found his way back to his mother’s doorstep. The post A 5-year-old fell asleep on the wrong train. He found his way home 25 years later on Google Earth. appeared first on Upworthy.