There are two words Saroo Brierley believes families should be very careful about: “next year”.
We’ll visit next year. We’ll organise Christmas next year. We’ll make the trip when things settle down. We’ll pick up the phone when the time feels right.
Most of us have said some version of it.
But for the man who spent 25 years separated from his birth family before an extraordinary search finally led him back to his mother in India, “next year” carries a little more weight.
“We tell ourselves there will always be next year, but that isn’t guaranteed for anyone,” Brierley tells Starts at 60.
It is also why the Australian whose remarkable life story inspired the Oscar-nominated film Lion has joined Victoria’s historic Tahbilk Estate for its inaugural Long Lost Lunch, an initiative designed to bring one Australian family that has spent too long apart back around the same table.
The reason for the separation might be thousands of kilometres. It might be money, work, ill health or circumstances beyond anyone’s control.
Sometimes nobody falls out.
People just drift. And then one year becomes five, five becomes 10.
Brierley knows better than most what it means to get some of that lost time back.
Saroo was just five years old when he became separated from his family in India in 1986. After surviving alone on the streets of Calcutta for several weeks, he was placed in an orphanage and eventually adopted by an Australian family in Hobart.
He grew up in Tasmania, but memories of another home remained. Decades later, armed with fragments from his childhood and using Google Earth to painstakingly trace the railway lines he remembered, he found his hometown of Khandwa.
In 2012, after 25 years apart, Saroo was reunited with his birth mother.
The story would become his memoir A Long Way Home and later Lion, starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman.
But take away the extraordinary search, the Hollywood film and the worldwide attention and Saroo’s memory of that day is strikingly simple.
It is the feeling of his mother’s arms around him.
“When I first embraced my birth mother, the world around me seemed to fade away,” he says. “I can still feel her arms around me in that moment and the overwhelming sense of relief and peace, knowing that after so many years of searching and wondering, we had finally found each other again.”
Most families will never experience a separation remotely like Saroo’s.
Yet he believes there is something in his experience that applies to many of us. Families can become disconnected without ever deciding to do so.
“Time and distance can create a sense of disconnect that builds slowly without anyone really noticing, until a year has become five, and then ten,” he says.
Cost-of-living pressures can make the interstate flight harder to justify, and work gets busy, health changes, families scatter across Australia and the world. Sometimes relationships become complicated.
And sometimes we simply assume there will be another Christmas.
For Saroo, growing older — and becoming a father himself — has changed the way he thinks about that assumption.
“When you’re younger there is a sense that time is endless and that the people you love will always be there,” he says.
“Growing older and becoming a father myself has changed that outlook for me. It’s made me realise how important it is to nurture family connections now, instead of assuming there will always be another chance.”
Today, he tries to return to India once or twice each year and he describes those journeys not as an obligation, but as a grounding ritual and something he looks forward to.
No doubt, there is wisdom in that for the rest of us.
We may not have an ocean separating us from the people we love. Sometimes the distance is a few suburbs, or sometimes it is an unanswered message, a disagreement neither side quite knows how to resolve, or simply too many years of saying, we really must catch up.
Saroo is also careful not to pretend every family separation has an easy answer.
For some people, distance is emotional rather than geographical, and there may be old hurts, disagreements or years of estrangement sitting between two people.
And reconnecting, he believes, does not necessarily require fixing every part of the past first.
“Every family has its own story and the path to reconnection is rarely simple,” he says. “I don’t believe it always has to mean resolving what has happened in the past.”
There is, however, something powerful about being prepared to make the first move.
“Reconnection isn’t defined by perfection, it’s defined by the willingness to show up and heal,” he says.
For someone contemplating that phone call, message or visit, Saroo’s advice is gentle rather than grand.
Start.
“There’s no harm in simply starting the process to see how it fits with your situation and emotions,” he says.
“Time has a way of slipping by faster than we expect.”
That philosophy sits behind Saroo’s involvement with Tahbilk’s Long Lost Lunch.
The historic Nagambie Lakes winery is searching for a multi-generational Australian family that has spent too long apart and would value the opportunity to reconnect.
For the Purbrick family, who have been custodians of Tahbilk for generations, the idea is built around something wonderfully uncomplicated: getting family back around a table. For Saroo, agreeing to co-host the reunion was deeply personal.
“Having experienced the power of reconnecting with loved ones myself, I know how life-changing that can be,” he says.
“To see a family reunited, surrounded by warmth, support and happiness, will be both a privilege and a reminder of the power of human connection.”
The family selected for the Long Lost Lunch will be brought together at Tahbilk Estate in Victoria’s Nagambie Lakes region in October, with flights and accommodation covered by Tahbilk.
Saroo says they are hoping to hear from a family ready to take that first step, whether time, distance or circumstances outside their control have kept them apart.
But perhaps the message of the Long Lost Lunch matters even for those who never nominate and there may be somebody whose name came into your head while reading this.
A brother. A sister. An old friend who became family. A child you haven’t seen enough of. A parent getting older. Grandchildren growing up on the other side of the country.
Perhaps there is history between you. Perhaps there isn’t.
Maybe life just got in the way.
Whatever the reason, Saroo knows fear can make that first contact difficult. We worry about what the other person will say, whether too much time has passed or whether reaching out might hurt more than staying silent.
His final advice is worth allowing to sit for a moment.
“If there is someone you love that you haven’t seen or spoken to for far too long, don’t let fear be the reason you never find out.”
Tahbilk’s inaugural Long Lost Lunch will reunite one Australian family at Tahbilk Estate in October, with flights and accommodation covered. Saroo Brierley will co-host the reunion.
Apply at the Tahbilk website
AU 18+ only. Ends 11:59pm AEDT 31/10/26. Limit 1 entry/person. T&Cs apply.
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