A woman, who went missing from a train when she was six years old, was reunited here with her parents after 17 years, all thanks to a faint memory, an enthusiastic Assam official and Google.

It seems straight out of a typical Bollywood movie. When she went missing she could speak only Hindi and today she can only speak Assamese.

Gudiya, 23, was reunited with her parents 17 years after she went missing on a train at Barauni railway station in Bihar.

According to Gudiya’s parents, in April 1997, Gudiya along with her maternal uncle was travelling by train from Patna to Guwahati on an express train to meet her grandfather, who was a railway official.

But fate had something else in store for her.

Gudiya’s uncle got down at Barauni railway station to purchase some eatable and failed to catch the train.

But Gudiya travelled to Guwahati alone where railway police officials found her and shifted her to a children’s home.

After she was put in a children’s home, Gudiya was not able to tell anyone about her parents in Patna. She only remembered that her uncle worked in a biscuit factory near a railway crossing in front of her house in Patna.

Neelakshi Sarma, an official of Assam state child protection society, tried all options to trace the whereabouts of Gudiya’s parents.

Her efforts paid off when she got a strong clue during a search on Google.

Sarma said last month she along with her husband visited Patna in search of Gudiya’s parents but failed. “It was full of frustration and disappointment as we returned without any trace,” she recalled.

She added: “It was a coincidence that I met Gudiya and developed a closeness to her. After that I decided to trace her parents and to reunite her. I succeeded thanks to the search on Google.”

“I was searching on Google for hours. One day I got the contact number of a biscuit factory in Patna that help me to trace Gudiya’s uncle and finally her parents,” she said.

Her parents rushed to Guwahati last Monday and met her.