Gaya resident Neeraj had only one reason to set off for Punjab from his hometown in Bihar — reunite the lost elderly man he had come to care for with his family.Emotional scenes were witnessed on Saturday after Neeraj brought Chaman Lal to his village Fatehgarh Gujjran in Ludhiana. Lal’s relatives embraced him with relief, as his grandson touched Neeraj’s feet, seeing in him the proof of “humanity still being alive”.Lal, whose memory has suffered, had gone missing during a pilgrimage to Amritsar where he was visiting the Golden Temple on September 11 under the Punjab government’s Mukh Mantri Tirath Yatra scheme.However, he got separated from his group and boarded a Bihar-bound train, according to his family, landing up hundreds of kilometres away in Gaya.It was in Gaya that Neeraj found him wandering around and sensed that the man had been lost. He decided to take the responsibility of locating his family. He took Lal home, where the elderly man stayed for four days.”I just wanted his family to be traced. I kept him for four days (at my home). When I left home (for Punjab), I just wanted to get him home somehow,” Neeraj said.Before leaving for Punjab, Neeraj said he traced Lal’s village Fatehgarh Gujjran with the help of the internet and decided to bring him along.Lal’s grandson Sukhchain, meanwhile, kept searching for the missing man. “I went to Amritsar on September 13. I kept looking for him there. I searched every street but could not find him. I came back today,” the emotional grandson said.A local said Neeraj, who had reached Punjab, asked him about the whereabouts of the Fatehgarh Gujjran village. The local had seen a social media post about the missing man and recognised him immediately. He called Lal’s family, who reached the location.Neeraj narrated the story of how he found Lal in Bihar and had brought him back.On reuniting with Lal, the family could not stop their tears, Neeraj said, adding that his eyes welled up too as emotions ran high. Sukhchain hugged the stranger-turned-saviour and touched his feet with gratitude.”A big thank you to Neeraj. It shows humanity is still alive,” he said.