Raja Gope was 6 years old when he boarded the wrong train in India.
He was traveling with his father to a brick kiln in West Bengal, but ended up alone, thousands of kilometers away, in Kerala. Activists found him in Ernakulam and he grew up in a children’s home, with only two clues to his former life: his parents’ names and the name of his village, Chaibasa. Over the years, he even forgot his mother tongue, Ho, and learned to speak Malayalam and Hindi.
Today he is 19 years old and plays football for a club in Kerala. In February 2026, he was transferred to Kannur as part of a child rehabilitation program, and there local activists connected with NGOs that tracked down his family in Jharkhand. In March, after 14 years away from home, Raja returned to Chaibasa and was finally able to embrace his mother and sisters. The whole village was waiting for him at the door of the house that had never stopped being his.