Today, 24 September 2026, we visited the picturesque town of Szentendre, which is about 10 miles north of Budapest. While returning from there by train we met a couple, and began chatting with them …

Before telling you about our brief encounter, here is some essential background information. The family of my wife’s mother hail from Mandvi in Kachchh (Kutch), which is now a part of the Indian state of Gujarat. We often visit Kachchh, especially Mandvi and the larger town Bhuj, which is the capital of Kachchh. I have written much about these places in my latest book “Road To Heaven – A passage through India”.

The couple we began chatting with on the train looked Indian and smiled at us, which was why we began speaking with them. They have lived in Sweden for many decades, and were visiting Budapest with a Swedish tour group. We soon discovered that they spoke Gujarati, one of the languages that my wife speaks fluently. In her family home, conversations between family members were mainly in Gujarati. We were surprised to be conversing in Gujarati with strangers on a suburban train in Hungary. We were not expecting such a situation.

Our surprise increased by leaps and bounds when we learned that the couple’s families had originated in Kachchh. Both families had come from Bhuj – a place we have visited many times.

Both the man and his wife had been born in Uganda, and their families had been thrown out of the country when Idi Amin had forced Indians to leave in 1971. Some of my wife’s cousins, also of Kachchh origin, were amongst those who had to leave their homes and businesses in Uganda. Many of the Indians expelled from Uganda have become successful entrepreneurs in the UK.

One of our new acquaintances had fled from Uganda to Sweden, which welcomed the refugees from East Africa, and the other had moved to India. Both his and her families had been friends in the Ugandan city of Kampala prior to Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Asians. Friendship between the two families resulted in the couple’s arranged marriage. Since then, the couple have been living and working in Sweden.

This chance meeting on the train was remarkable. I wondered what is the probability that two sets of strangers, both Gujarati speaking and both with origins in Kachchh, would meet on a short train journey in the environs of the capital of Hungary. It was a pretty unlikely , but it happened.