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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2026/jul/25/long-lost-family-reunited-chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-ai>
"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.”
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, Rosey. 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 discuss with Avtar."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
