![a long way home by saroo brierley a long way home by saroo brierley](https://media.s-bol.com/gJJoPDDOmoN9/798x1200.jpg)
Long before I could read them, I knew that the immense V of the Indian subcontinent was a place teeming with cities and towns, with deserts and mountains, rivers and forests-the Ganges, the Himalayas, tigers, gods!-and it came to fascinate me. The map’s hundreds of place-names swam before me throughout my childhood.
A LONG WAY HOME BY SAROO BRIERLEY SKIN
But my skin color would always have given away my origins, and anyway, she and my father chose to adopt a child from India for a reason, as I will go into later. Another adoptive parent might have made the decision that I was young enough to start my life in Australia with a clean slate and could be brought up without much reference to where I’d come from. All these things seemed sort of familiar, even if I hadn’t seen anything exactly like them before. She had also put some Indian printed fabric in my room, across the dresser, and a carved wooden puppet in a brightly colored outfit. I didn’t know then that these weren’t normal objects to have in an Australian house. Mum had decorated the house with Indian objects-there were some Hindu statues, brass ornaments and bells, and lots of little elephant figurines. I didn’t even know what a map was, let alone the shape of India. She had to teach me what the map represented-I was completely uneducated. My mum-my adoptive mother-had put it there to help me feel at home when I arrived from that country at the age of six to live with them in 1987. When I was growing up in Hobart, I had a map of India on my bedroom wall.