Culture clash hits reunited family

[Miss Chicken]

A few months ago I started a thread about Tasmanian man, Saroo Brierley and how he was reunited with his mother in India. The updated story is here. It is a long article so I will summarise it.

Saroo was born into a poor family in India. Soon after the birth of Saroo's little sister, Saroo's father deserted the family and the mother, Fatima, became even poorer. She had three sons and a little baby to provide for.

A couple of years later Saroo and his older brother Guddu went to the railway station to beg and look for lost change. They boarded a train so that Guddu could sweep under the seats for change. Saroo fell asleep and when he woke up he couldn't find his brother. His brother's body was later found along the tracks, he had either accidentally fallen off the train, or possibly someone had pushed/thrown him from the train.

Saroo ended up in Calcutta and eventually was taken to an orphanage. He was adopted by a Tasmanian couple, who later adopted a second boy from India.

Fatima searched for him for a long time.

When he grew up Saroo started to search for his Indian family. He spent several years looking at photos on Google Earth trying to find images that were familiar to him. Eventually he found photos of the railway station and of the fountain he had played in as a child.

He went to India, found his family and spent 10 days with them. His mother couldn't speak English, and Saroo himself only had a few words of Hindi. Communication was difficult.

Now it seems that serious problems have risen between Saroo and Fatima.

From the article

In Tasmania, Saroo faced more changes. The media frenzy over his story intensified. He hired an agent to juggle interview requests. Movie producers began calling. Publishing houses battled over the book rights.
He went back to work at his family's hose supply business, and hunted for a house with his girlfriend. He turned off his phone at night to silence the relentless ringing.
He began sending Fatima $100 a month, so she could quit her job cleaning homes and washing dishes that pays her about 1,500 rupees ($30) a month. But she hasn't quit her job and hasn't touched the money he put in her bank account. She insists she won't take his money unless he gives it to her in person.
She seems to want him to care for his mother as a good Indian boy should, seeing to her every need, following her commands and revering her above any job, girlfriend or wife. That's what many sons are brought up to do in India. Not in Australia.
She still lives in her tiny concrete home with peeling whitewash and a roof of bamboo and corrugated metal, surviving on subsidized grain, near-rotten onions she buys at a discount and stale bread she softens in lentil stew. She frets that her poverty might embarrass Saroo or his Australian parents.
The gulf between mother and son remains vast.

Fatima is very angry. Some of her comments are

"Take care of the family you are staying with, don't bother with this family here'

Then he announces he is coming back. He is getting money together and is going to buy her a house.
"No, no!" she says angrily. Don't bother coming. I will go away for a few months and no one will be here to see you"

but Saroo has another life

He hopes to visit India once or twice a year, but he cannot move back. He has other responsibilities, other family and a whole other life in Tasmania.
He is Australian now.
"This is where I live," he says. "When I come back, whether it's sooner or later, then we can start building our relationship again."
Fatima is confused and frustrated.

She doesn't want him to move back here, where there is nothing. But she wants to be with him. Maybe she can move to Australia, she says. She adds sternly that she would ban all girlfriends from his house.A few minutes later she softens. She couldn't really move away from her life here to an unfamiliar place where no one can talk with her, she says.

At least, and at last, Saroo's return has brought her "mental peace," she says. She tries to understand that he has new parents, new expectations and a new life a world away.

She just wants him to see her once in a while, to call her occasionally, even if they can only speak a few sentences to each other.

"For the moment," she says, "it's enough for me that I went to him. And he called me Amma."

Mother.

Do you think that the culture differences between Saroo and Fatima are too great to overcome, or do you think that, in the end, love will help them overcome these problems?

 

[Shanndee]

Oh, that is heartbreaking.

From your summary of the situation I would say outside forces alone are going to be difficult to overcome (constant harassment for the rights to your life story while you try to sort out your life would be more than difficult to bear)

Now add the culture clash. This man is Australian and has an Australian family. He doesn't even share a language with his mother (how old was he when he was adopted?). He is trying to do what is right.

I really hope that love will be able to find a way...but it looks like it will be a long, difficult battle.

Heartbreaking.

 

[wissaboo]

I remember when this first hit the news. So sad. I don't know how the bridge can be gapped really. They are worlds apart.

 

[Miss Chicken]

I am not sure how old he was when he was adopted. He was between 5 and 6 years old when he was separated from his family and was adopted a few months, possibly a much as year later.

Between being lost and being adopted he faced another problem. He ended up in Calcutta where Bengali is spoken not Hindi so he didn't speak his birth language while on the streets or in the orphanage.

 

[Kestra]

Not everyone in Kolkata (Calcutta) is Bengali.

 

[Miss Chicken]

Not everyone in Kolkata (Calcutta) is Bengali.

I am just going on what Saroo said - he remembers arriving in Calcutta and not understanding the language people were speaking.

the article says

The doors opened and Saroo stepped out into chaos.
Hordes of people, pushing, rushing. Speaking in an unfamiliar tongue. He was in Calcutta, nearly 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) from home. It might as well have been Mars.
He pleaded for help. But he spoke Hindi, and most here spoke Bengali. Besides, he had never been to school; he didn't know his last name, or the city he came from – only the name of his neighborhood and not how to spell it. No one understood him.

 

[Kestra]

I get that it would be confusing to a young child, definitely. And that Bengali is probably more widely spoken there. But people learn to speak Hindi in schools, not to mention read and write it in a lot of schools as well. Even if someone hadn't been taught Hindi, Bengali has a lot of similarities. They have different scripts but share a lot of commonalities.

Sorry to be harping on this point, it just strikes me as odd. I was raised with Bengali but when we go to India I certainly understand a great deal of the Hindi spoken. And I'm not even fluent in Bengali. If he didn't know enough to even tell people anything that's one thing, but I don't get how there could be this huge language barrier.

 

[Miss Chicken]

But he was a frightened, traumatised little boy from the slums of Khandwa who didn't even know his last name, nor his city's name. He probably didn't have the skills to notice the similarities between Hindi and Bengali. No-one paid him much attention because they considered him just to be another beggar so even if they could understand his speech they probably didn't want to listen to him. He did meet two men who spoke Hindi, the first he ran away from because he became suspicious of the man's intentions, the second man took him to the orphanage.

Though that said, I would have expected the orphanage to have tried harder to discover where he was from.

Edited to add - it does look like the last orphanage he was in did try to look for his family

Weeks later, a staffer told him he was moving again. He was cleaned up, dressed up and transported to the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption.
This place was heaven. There were around 15 children, and no one bullied him. He even made friends. He had a comfortable bed, fresh clothes, plenty of food.
The staff hunted for his family, using the scraps of information Saroo remembered. But it wasn't enough. The government declared him a lost child.

 

[Roger Wilco]

I'm sorry, but imo this isn't a "culture clash", that man's biological mother just sounds like a jerk.

 

[BillJ]

I'm sorry, but imo this isn't a "culture clash", that man's biological mother just sounds like a jerk.

Good to know people tolerate other cultures.