A 70-year-old lost at the Golden Temple got on a train to Bihar. A 19-year-old in Gaya spent four days finding his village, then rode back with him

A 70-year-old man who lost his group on a pilgrimage to the Golden Temple in Amritsar and boarded the wrong train was brought home to his village in Ludhiana district on Saturday by a 19-year-old construction worker from Gaya, in Bihar. Neeraj Kumar had kept him at his own home for four days, three of which he spent on Google and ChatGPT working out where the one place name the old man could remember actually was.

Chaman Lal, of Fatehgarh Gujjran near Machhiwara Sahib, had left on 11 September on one of the free buses the Punjab government runs for older pilgrims under its Chief Minister's Tirath Yatra scheme, and his family told NDTV, which reported the story first on Sunday, that he has had trouble with his memory for a long time.

The wrong train

At the temple he became separated from the others, and Dainik Bhaskar's Ludhiana reporter wrote that he went looking for them and wandered instead towards Amritsar railway station, where a train for Bihar was standing at the platform, and he got on without a ticket and did not get off until Gaya, about 1,200 kilometres to the east.

Back in Amritsar his companions searched, rang the family, and went home when the bus left, but his grandson, Sukhchain Singh, came up from Ludhiana, lodged a complaint with the police and kept walking the streets of the city looking for him, Bhaskar reported. The village posted his photograph on social media, and eight days passed without a word of him from anywhere, according to Bhaskar and to Hindustan Times.

Gaya station

Neeraj Kumar, who is 19 and works on building sites in Gaya, found him at the railway station there, confused, hungry and asking for something to eat, and instead of walking on he fed him, took him home to his own family and kept him there while he tried to find out who he was, NDTV and Dainik Jagran reported.

The old man spoke only Punjabi, which made every question harder, News18 wrote, and the one thing he could tell Neeraj with any certainty was the name of his village, Fatehgarh Gujjran. Neeraj tried Google Maps first, and when that gave him nothing he turned to ChatGPT and to plain internet searches, trying different spellings of the name for three days, Bhaskar reported, until one of them placed it in Ludhiana district, near Machhiwara Sahib.

He did not send him alone

Having found the village on a map, Neeraj decided not to send the old man back on his own, India Today reported, and instead rode the train with him from Gaya to Ludhiana, took a bus on to Machhiwara, and on Saturday went through the town showing Chaman Lal's photograph to anyone who would look at it.

Some of the men he stopped were busy with preparations for a senate election, Bhaskar wrote, and among them was a man known in the town as Master Krishan Lal, who had seen the missing-person post the village put up and recognised the face at once, and who rang Sukhchain Singh to tell him his grandfather was standing in the street.

Saturday

Sukhchain came at once, and in Bhaskar's account he held his grandfather and both of them wept, and then he bent and touched the feet of the stranger from Gaya who had brought him, while News18, citing NDTV, reported that the family welcomed Neeraj at their house with garlands and offered him money and clothes for what he had done.

Neeraj told reporters that he had decided to help simply because he had found the old man alone and in distress at the station, and that once he knew where the village was he felt it was his responsibility to see the man reach his family, India Today reported, rather than to point him towards a train.

The scheme that took Chaman Lal to Amritsar was started by the state government on 9 November last year and runs 95 air-conditioned buses, and the tourism minister, Tarunpreet Singh Sond, said last week that 510,807 pilgrims over the age of 50 had travelled on it free of charge so far, Dainik Jagran reported on 18 September.