Video: Courtesy of Nicci Dhamu / Guardian Design Family ‘I thought, I’ve tried everything else, why not give AI a shot?’: the long-lost family reunited by ChatGPT Avtar spent decades wondering what happened to the mother he never got to know. Thousands of miles away, Nicci was haunted by the story of a half-brother given away before she was born. How did a chatbot bring them together?
As a small boy growing up in Amritsar, India, in the 1960s, Avtar Singh used to hear whispers. Your mum isn’t really your mum , the rumours would say. Your mum lives abroad. Avtar didn’t really pay any attention to it. “I thought, the neighbours are just making up stories.” But the stories were true: the woman raising Avtar was actually his grandmother. When he was too young to remember it, his father had emigrated to Canada to work as a teacher, leaving Avtar in the care of his paternal grandparents. His grandfather, a police officer, was a fearsome authoritarian, but his grandmother brought him up with tenderness, as if he were her own son. She called him by his nickname, Titu. He felt loved.
When Avtar was around eight years old, he was told about his family in Canada: his dad, his mum and a little brother were waiting for him there, and he would soon travel to join them. Just after his ninth birthday, Avtar found himself sitting on a plane, dressed in a three‑piece suit and tie. He was travelling alone. He had never flown before. He didn’t speak a word of English. He landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Christmas Eve, 1968; his family met him at the airport and took him home. “I didn’t know what to think,” Avtar, now 66, tells me in a video call from his home in Abbotsford, British Columbia. “Before I knew it, it was the first week of January, and I was put in school.”
View image in fullscreen Avtar with his grandmother in the mid-60s in Amritsar, India (above), and (below) aged 10, in 1969, the year after he moved to Canada. Courtesy of Avtar Singh Unable to communicate with any of the other pupils, Avtar watched what they did and followed along, storing his snow boots in the cloakroom, standing up to sing the Canadian national anthem and God Save the Queen. But with his long hair tied in the topknot often worn by Sikh boys, he stood out. His parents offered to buy him a hockey stick and a pair of ice skates if he agreed to get his hair cut. He learned English. His nickname changed from Titu to the more Canadian “Tito”. He began to blend in.
But Avtar didn’t fit in at home. He was much paler than everyone else – “the white sheep of the family,” he jokes. And they treated him like an outsider, an afterthought. When he was 14, his family went on holiday without him, leaving Avtar home alone for two weeks. He got on well enough with his father, but didn’t gel at all with his mother. “She didn’t have any of the warmth that my grandma had. She absolutely hated me.” She seemed much more like a stepmother than a mother.
That feeling was confirmed when Avtar got married and his grandparents flew over to stay with him and his new wife, Rosie. His grandma “whispered into my wife’s ear” that Avtar was the product of his father’s first marriage. “She didn’t say what my mother’s name was. She just said, ‘Her family was from Africa, and she left the child with us and went back to Africa. She might have gone to live in the UK.’ That’s it.” It didn’t feel right to ask his grandparents for more information: this was clearly a family secret that no one wanted to dis…