Tonight I watched the film “Lion”, and I have not felt so many feelings or shed so many tears watching a film in quite a while.

The story, based on one man’s real life, begins simply and horrifically enough- a young boy accompanies his older brother from a small community in western India to try and find some night work at a nearby town. Once they arrive at the town, it is evening, and the boy’s brother asks him to stay put on a bench on the train station platform while the brother goes to find where work might be. The boy, 5, from an illiterate family, knows his mom as mum and knows his brother and their younger sister by their first names, and for him, for them, that is enough. When his brother is away from the station for a while, the boy, sleepy, climbs into an empty rail car and falls asleep.

And awakes to the train moving, his car empty and locked up, inescapable from within. He is on a decommissioned train that he is trapped in for several days, without food, without water, without companions, until it arrives in Calcutta, 1600 miles away from his home, and when the train is opened, he is an immediate urchin. He speaks Hindi, the locals speak Bengali. He doesn’t know where he is from. He cannot tell people how to help him find his family. He is lost.

And then 20 years happen, where the boy goes from homelessness to orphanage to adoption into a family on another continent, where he is raised surrounded by wealth and privilege, and he is loved.

But as he grows older, he cannot escape the reality of where he came from, and the knowledge that his mom and his beloved brother is out there somewhere, not knowing what happened to him.

I won’t give away the rest of the film, but, boy, it sure works on the heart.

Central to a few early scenes in the film are images of packs of children living and running together on the streets and in the alleyways and abandoned buildings of that massive city, in which some of them are periodically abducted for predominantly heartbreaking ends. Those moments in the film punched my heart deeply, because of the reality that truly exists like that in cities all around the world. Children discarded, used, abused, unloved. I know part of why I am in this world is because my soul aches when I see that stuff, which means I should be doing something about that, if I can, with my own life.

I have to say though.

As I watched the film, I was reminded that you do not have to be a little urchin without family or home to feel lost. Maybe that was part of the draw and impact of the film.

It is a great metaphor for inner isolation that is a common human experience. Being lost is an oft horrifying, terrifying experience, when you are a foreigner, an alien, and do not know who to trust- in a foreign land, in a divided nation, in a grizzled city, in a broken home. .