I’m sorry you had to adopt us and bring us into your life.” I almost threw something at the screen. Of the many gobsmacking moments in Lion, the most offensive is a conversation between Saroo and his adoptive mother, Sue, where he reveals his search and boldly, tactlessly says, “I’m sorry you couldn’t have children. Even at that age, people would ask me if I knew my “real” family, and, if not, when I planned on meeting up with them at Starbucks. I’ve not had any interest in looking for them since. It was an unusual jolt that, retrospectively, was probably informed by the expectations people had for me at the time. When I was 6, at Disney World, I had a brief panic attack wondering where my birth family was.

I was adopted from an orphanage in Guangzhou, China, by white parents. As to what he has been doing since, all we know is that he’s now studying hotel management, in a relationship with Lucy (Rooney Mara), and that he begins to sacrifice his exceptional relationship with his adoptive parents for the sake of his journey of self-actualization. Seeing them as a 25-year-old brings Saroo’s memories flooding back. On the table, serving as a kind of Chekhov’s candy, are brightly colored fried treats called jalebi, which Saroo and Guddu used to drool over as children. Flash forward to 20 years later, where the food at a friend’s party in Melbourne triggers in Saroo, now played by Dev Patel, an obsessive search for home. He winds up in an orphanage in Kolkata, where shortly after he is adopted by a Tasmanian couple, played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham. Late one night in a train station, 5-year-old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) falls asleep on a train car while waiting for his older brother, Guddu, and wakes up far from his home in a romantically impoverished India-specifically Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh.

Lion in hindi is called saroo