'Finding Grandpa': Remarkable story of a Sikh family's persistence to trace grandfather to Australia

Sometime in early September 1920, at the Lahore Railway Station, a young Sikh couple, Mehnga Singh and his wife Radh Kaur, stood waiting for a train to Calcutta.

Radh Kaur held their six-year-old son by the hand.

Mehnga was brimming with excitement for the journey ahead—Calcutta was merely the halfway mark on his passage to Australia, a land that promised opportunity and freedom.

But Radh Kaur’s eyes betrayed hesitation. She was scared of going to a place where she would have no relatives. Her heart was set on living in their village, Simblwala, near Tohana, in what was then pre-Independent Punjab.

As the train neared, their disagreement turned into an argument. Radh, clutching her son tightly, pleaded for her husband to abandon his foreign dream. Mehnga, hurt and resolute, stepped away and boarded alone. The whistle blew and his figure vanished into the distance.

That was the last time Radh Kaur and young Sulakhan Singh ever saw him. They returned to Simblwala in silence.

Life settled into a routine. Sulakhan grew up, married and had three sons, though only one—Baljinder Singh—survived infancy. When Baljinder was four, his mother died and grief settled deeper into the household.

It fell to Radh Kaur to raise her grandson. In the dim light of those evenings, she told him moral tales and stories from sacred texts, but often, her voice lingered longest over one story—that of the grandfather who had gone to Australia, promising one day to return.

He never did. The boy, listening to her trembling voice, would place a hand on her arm and say softly that when he grew up, he would go to Australia and bring his grandfather home. But did he find him?

Baljinder’s journey became the story of a documentary, "Finding Grandpa". Director Anita Barar and producer Cinzia Guaraldi have brought to light the powerful story and historians Len Kenna and Crystal Jordan massively contributed to uncover the unmarked grave of the Sikh migrant who later changed his name to Charles Singh.

That boy kept his word. Years passed, and when Radh Kaur died in 1982, her grandson held on to her hope as a kind of inheritance. In February 1986, Baljinder Singh arrived in Sydney with nothing more than fragmented clues—a few half-remembered names, a handful of locations his grandmother used to mutter about, and vague references to “Surry Hills” and “Pigott,” a name that had appeared on some old postcard his grandfather once sent.

Mehnga Singh, born in February 1894, had completed his matriculation in 1910 and joined British Railways as a guard, serving in India before postings in East Africa and Burma. Eventually, in 1920, he journeyed onward to Australia.

As a child, those places were just words to Baljinder, too remote to picture, too foreign to imagine. In his youth, his father once mentioned a purple wool sweater with shiny tinsel that Mehnga had sent back in the early 1930s.

His mother had knitted it into a jumper that was rewoven time and again until it fell apart. Those small things—wool, postcards, scattered memories—were all that remained. One day, while cleaning his father’s trunk, Baljinder, following instructions he did not understand, threw the old letters into a fire, not realizing that he was burning the last tangible link to his grandfather’s story.

He often teased his grandmother when she described Mehnga’s looks and mischief. She would recall that he was tall, fair, and handsome like an Englishman, with a playful nature. Baljinder would laugh and accuse her of romantic exaggerations, and she would chase him around the courtyard, swinging a stick or a slipper, calling him mischievous names through her laughter.

“Looking back now,” Baljinder would say years later, “I feel guilty. Her pain was real, and I used to laugh at it.” She passed away in 1982, still dreaming that one day news of her husband would arrive from across the oceans. Four years after her death, Baljinder landed in Australia.

He began his search in Surry Hills, tracing the address on that forgotten postcard: C/O Mr. Pigott, Crown Street. He found a John Pigott running a news agency on Oxford Street but was curtly told that the man’s elderly father, possibly the one connected to the letter, suffered from dementia and would remember nothing. That door closed quickly.

So began decades of searching through official offices, records, and cemeteries. Baljinder spent two days at the Department of Land Titles, trawled through shelves at the National Archives and State Archives, and checked the Anglican Church in Sydney, hoping for baptismal or burial records.

He visited cemeteries at Rookwood, Bronte, Vaucluse, and Newtown. He wrote repeatedly to the Office of Births and Deaths, the Maritime Museum, and the Indian Consulate. He even contacted local police at Camden and wandered through aged care homes, flipping through old registers. He traveled to Woolgoolga, a coastal town where Sikhs had settled since the late 1800s, and asked at the oldest gurdwara if anyone remembered the name Mehnga Singh. No one did. Days blurred into years. Leads emerged, then collapsed. “I was chasing my grandfather like a headless chook,” he said later.

Every rejection letter began with the same words, “Not listed,” and every time, they hollowed him out a little more. Baljinder’s search remained elusive for years because, unknown to the family in India, his grandfather had adopted a new identity after arriving in Australia, calling himself Charles Singh. For twenty-three years, Baljinder Singh searched fruitlessly, his resolve flickering but never dying. Then, on July 23, 2009, a letter arrived from the National Archives. It said: “Based on the information you have provided, we believe we have located a file. Please make an appointment if you wish to inspect.”

For the first time, there was something more than silence.

“I couldn’t sleep that night,” he recalled. The next morning, he arrived at the archives early, trembling between anxiety and hope. Simon Barlow, the archive manager, greeted him, handed him a ribbon-tied, dust-covered file, and told him gently, “We don’t know if this is your man. Some names have been redacted for security reasons.” Baljinder’s hands shook as he untied the ribbon. Each page told parts of a life long vanished, and then he saw it — the answer that ended a lifetime of waiting. Under “Marital Status,” Mehnga Singh had typed, “Yes.” Then, in another line: “Wife’s name: Radh Singh. Year of marriage: 1912.”

Baljinder’s breath caught. His eyes blurred, and he began to cry, the sound breaking through the quiet reading room. In that instant, he felt the years collapse, as if his grandmother’s voice was whispering beside him, “Didn’t I tell you?” Archive staff offered him tissues, water, and compassion, while he cried over a name on paper that had haunted his family for generations.

He left that day with photocopies of the file, feeling the weight of his grandmother’s sorrow finally lift. “Eighty-nine years,” he whispered, “it took eighty-nine years to find him.” Alas, his father, Sulakhan Singh, the six-year-old boy left standing on the railway platform in 1920, had passed away just four months before Baljinder found the file.