The woman's video was shared with her grandson, Prithvi Bhaiyalal Shingane, a Nagpur resident (File)
A 94- year-old woman from Maharashtra, who had gone missing four decades ago, has reunited with her family, thanks to the Internet.
Sometime in 1979-80, a truck driver spotted a woman, clueless and in a bad condition, walking along a road in Madhya Pradesh's Damoh district.
"She had been stung by honeybees and could not speak coherently," Israr Khan, the truck driver's son, told PTI.
Mr Khan's father took the woman home and she began to live with his family. Israr himself was a baby then.
"We called her Achchhan Mausi (aunt). She was mentally unstable and used to mutter in Marathi which we could not understand. I sometimes asked her about her family, but she could not tell anything," he said.
Mr Khan later took it upon himself to find her family. He wrote about her on Facebook but could not find out about her, he says.
"She used to talk about a place called "Khanjma Nagar''. Google search of the name yielded no result. Then on May 4 this year, as we were at home amid lockdown, I again asked her about her hometown," he said.
"This time she spoke about a place called Parsapur. We googled it and found that there is one Paraspur in Maharashtra," Mr Khan said.
On May 7, Mr Khan contacted a man called who runs a shop in Paraspur and told him about the woman.
The man told him that there is a village called Khanjma Nagar near the town.
"I sent him Mausi's video at 8:30 pm on May 7, which he shared on a WhatsApp group. I received a phone call from Abhishek (the man) around midnight, saying the woman had been identified and her relatives traced," Mr Khan said.
The woman's video was shared with her grandson, Prithvi Bhaiyalal Shingane, a Nagpur resident. The astounded family wanted to bring her home but couldn't because of the coronavirus lockdown.
On June 17, they took the woman - Panchfulabai Tejpalsingh Shingane - home.
Unfortunately, the woman reached her grandson's house in Nagpur three days ago, she could not meet her son. He had died three years ago.
"In 1979, my father brought my grandmother to Nagpur for treatment of her mental ailment from Khanjma Nagar. The doctors were optimistic about curing her. But one day she left home in the evening, telling neighbours that she was going to her father's place and disappeared. My father searched for her for years without success. He died in 2017," he said.
"At the age of 94, my grandmother is still in good health thanks to the Khan family who looked after her for such a long time," he added.