How Rakesh Belal - the Saroo Brierley of our family - found his lost home

Last night, as I watched the multiple-Oscar nominated film Lion, images from my own life unfolded in my head, interfering with the screen images. Lion was too close to home to not draw parallels. Dev Patel's face would often morph into Rakesh Singh Belal's face.

A year before Saroo Brierley began getting haunting visions of his past, Rakesh Singh Belal in India had already found his house using Google Earth.

Who is Rakesh Singh Belal? My family's first encounter with Rakesh Singh Belal began on a train.

It was the summer of 1996 when my parents set off from the New Delhi railway station to go to our hometown Ghazipur. They noticed a young boy scavenging for food in their train compartment.

My mother offered him food and my father asked him to sit by his side. Before they could realise, the train had started moving and Rakesh was en route Ghazipur.

Until he reached the train, he had fled many places. He had lost a sense of a home.

Belal is not his real name. That's the name my mother gave him. He is Rakesh Singh from a village in Uttar Pradesh called Hauwwapura. Though he had no clue where it was, he knew that the nearest big city was Agra.

He said his father's was "Jungli Singh" - which, as we it turned out many years later, was Jungani Singh - and his mother's Shanti Devi.

His father died early and the mother, perhaps mentally disturbed, abandoned him and left home too. His uncle and aunt became his guardians but their abuse made him run away from his ancestral home.

And then, one evening, he found himself gagged on a railway track, but someone rescued him. He boarded a random train and landed in Delhi.

In the capital, he first found refuge at a police constable's home, but he was ill-treated there too. He fled this place too, but was soon caught by the authorities and thrown into a correction facility - a depressing institution where the rooms were cramped, the food was of poor quality and the older kids were vicious to the younger inmates. Finally, he escaped from there too, and that's when my parents found him on the train.

Two weeks later, they returned home ,to Delhi, with Belal in tow. The first thing they did was file an FIR. But of course it was a mere formality. The police did not move.

That is when Belal's life with us started. My parents became his parents, and our home his as well. There were some problems. He did not like our kind of food. But he overcame that. He had survived far worse in his life.

My parents got him admitted into a local school and a structured daily routine began. But to our extended family, he remained an outsider. He never got the same acceptance as us. Sometimes it would bother him.

Our mother's assurances would fall short and his discomfort remained. Soon, he was the tallest in his class, but his interest in studies waned. He cleared his sixth grade exam but failed in the seventh grade. We were all disappointed.

A repeat attempt the next year resulted in failure too. By then, he was completely off studies and dropped out of school. He made strange friends, stayed outside home for long hours, and would offer no explanation for his absence. He started stealing money from Dad, and his behaviour became rude and indifferent.

He started questioning our motives and, in his fits, pointed out our discriminatory treatment towards him. Our relationship plummeted.

Then one day, a phone call from the local police station made matters worse. He was caught stealing CDs and later confessed he would sell the same at a local flea market for stolen goods for some easy money.

My father used his influence and managed to get him out, ensuring no charge was pressed against him. But Belal was shaken. He returned home frightened. Our parents used his contrition to get him back into the fold. They made him pledge that he will shun his bad habits, reform himself, and resume school. Belal applied to the National Institute of Open Schooling for Class 10 and his second innings began.

His interest in technology grew. He would fiddle around with the computer and play stations for long. Soon we found that he was running a play station repair shop in our mezzanine floor. It was around this time that he got introduced to the internet. He would spend his days browsing for gaming software, even pornography.

One day, my cousin told him about Google Earth and that triggered the search for his roots. He would search for Hauwwapura endlessly, but find nothing. Then one day, during a Google search he typed Hauwwapura and chanced upon an entry that mentioned a town, Karawali. Before we knew he was aboard a bus to Agra and then en route Karawali.

When he reached Karawali, he did not find anything that resonated with his memory. Disappointed, he boarded the bus back to Delhi.

As the bus moved, he turned towards his fellow passenger and asked him whether he knew of a certain Mansingh (his uncle) in Hauwwapura. The fellow passenger said yes and led him straight to his ancestral house.

On May 26, 2007 at 9pm, 11 years after we found him on a railway platform, we got a call from a triumphant Rakesh Singh Belal. His opening words were, "Mummy! I found my house. I am standing in front of it."

Our parents reacted with a mixture of disbelief, relief, and joy.

Belal became a hero in his village. The news spread like wildfire and soon people from adjoining villages poured in to have a look at this wonder boy. Three days later, he came back to Delhi with photographs and stories of his reunion.

However, Rakesh Belal's story didn't have a happy ending like Saroo's. Ten years later, he is still embroiled in a legal battle with his uncle over his ancestral property. Though the court has given him his identity back and possession over his land, gaining access to the land has been a challenge for him.

Our father passed away in 2010. Rakesh Belal, a graduate now, still lives with our mother in Delhi and is now preparing for his civil service exams.

India faces an epidemic of missing children, with nearly 90,000 going missing every year. The journeys of Saroo and Rakesh took them back to where they came from. But finding a home is far more complicated.

May Google Earth have more such stories of lost children finding their way back home.

Also read: How a boy from Madhya Pradesh found his lost family with Google Earth - and made Lion