Avtar Singh grew up in Amritsar hearing rumors that the woman raising him wasn’t his mother. He ignored them. “I thought, the neighbours are just making up stories,” he told The Guardian. They were true. His father had emigrated to Canada to teach, leaving Avtar with his grandparents. His grandmother raised him and called him Titu.
Just after his ninth birthday, he was flown to Canada alone, in a three-piece suit, speaking no English. He soon learned the language and blended in at school. At home, he was an afterthought. When he was 14, the family went on vacation and left him behind for two weeks. “She didn’t have any of the warmth that my grandma had,” he said of the woman he thought was his mother. “She absolutely hated me.”
Years later, while visiting Avtar and his wife Rosey, his grandmother whispered to Rosey that Avtar was his father’s son from a first marriage. Avtar got a first name from his father and nothing else: Savinder. “I was stonewalled.”
Then, Rosey’s antenatal tests came back with anomalies. A geneticist asked about family medical history, but Avtar couldn’t provide any. “I couldn’t tell them anything about my mother’s family history. It hit me right in the heart. That’s when I thought, I’ve got to do something.”
He searched for years but didn’t have any luck since “Savinder” is a pretty common Punjabi Sikh name. The one thing he wouldn’t do was a DNA test, having spent his career as a chartered accountant. “They can sell it. Not only that, if they see something in my DNA, that affects my kids.”
On May 8, he was in the south of France with Rosey, awake early on a trip they’d taken after he finished cancer treatment. “I thought, I’ve tried Google and everything else; why don’t I give AI a shot?”
He typed in what he had plus what he could guess: basically, a woman named Savinder, 87 to 97 years old, probably given the middle name “Kaur” like other Sikh women her age, connected to India, Africa, and maybe the U.K. ChatGPT returned Savinder Kaur Nagi, born in 1936 in Kisumu, Kenya, and cited a tribute article.
“I know that AI can just make up shit,” Avtar said. “But it actually referenced an article.”
The tribute was written by Nicci Dhamu, a London jewelry designer, about her mother who died in December 2024 at 88. Savinder had been pulled out of school in Kenya as a girl and married off near Amritsar. When the marriage went badly, her dad brought her home, and her husband’s family took her son back. She never told her children about him. In her last years with dementia, she cried out, “Mera bacha.” My child.
Nicci had been trying to find him for two years with no name to work from. “No one’s going to call themselves Titu on LinkedIn, are they? How do you find somebody without a name? It’s impossible.”
Rosey read the tribute and wasn’t convinced since it said nothing about a first marriage. Then, Avtar scrolled back to a photo of a dressmaking certificate Savinder earned in Dhariwal in 1962. “This is two or three years after I was born, and it is in the exact city where I was born.”
He emailed Nicci at 8:36 that morning. It arrived on what would have been her mother’s 90th birthday. “I just had a real sense of knowing. I can’t explain it.”
Two hours after the prompt, he called Nicci.
“Mummy was married and divorced in India,” Nicci told him.
“Did she have any children?”
“Yes. She had a son.”
“Titu, is that you?” she asked. “Are you Titu, my mother’s son?”
He and Rosey both started crying. “That’s who I am,” he said. “But I haven’t heard anyone pronounce my nickname that way since my grandma called me that when I was a little boy.”
They talked for two hours until his phone died. He was in London within days. Neither of them wants a DNA test to confirm it. “This world has a few billion people in it,” Avtar said. “And if somebody can randomly call me Titu, I don’t think I need any more verification than that.”
He’s unsentimental about what found her. “Right now, AI is still a glorified search engine. It is a piece of software that recognises a pattern in a string of characters. There’s no intelligence there.”
He always assumed his mother gave him up so she could move on, and says he never held it against her. “Now I’ve heard from Nicci and other people in the family that my mum used to cry for me. That’s all I need to hear. It just feels so good to know that I was loved.”
