WARRNAMBOOL: Legendary cricketer Kapil Dev Sunday helped grant the final wish of an Indian migrant who died in Australia 63 years ago -- to bring his ashes back home.

Moved by the story of the childless hawker whose ashes had been held by a funeral home for decades in the hope that relatives would one day claim them, Dev travelled to Warrnambool in Victoria to collect the remains.

"I think it`s an amazing story. This is definitely different to anything in my life I have ever done," Dev told the Warrnambool Standard.

"This story has touched many, many people`s hearts. This is the bridge between the people to say you can love each other.

"It`s one of the best, emotional stories with a happy ending."

Australian broadcaster Manpreet Singh said Dev offered to bring the ashes of Pooran Singh home after hearing how the migrant -- who died in 1947 aged 77 -- had asked that his body be cremated and his ashes be taken to India and immersed in the River Ganges.

At the time, Warrnambool`s Guyett`s Funerals sent the body to Melbourne to be cremated -- then the only place in the state with a crematorium -- and Singh`s ashes were mailed back to them in a plastic cylinder.

But attempts to contact his family in Bilga, a village in Punjab which he had left in 1899, were unsuccessful and the funeral home held on to the ashes in case Singh`s wishes could one day be fulfilled.

In the 1980s, after further attempts to contact his descendants failed, the Warrnambool Cemetery Trust placed the ashes in a niche in the Warrnambool cemetery wall.

Manpreet Singh said a chance discussion with Dev about the treatment of Indians in Australia -- then a hot topic due to several violent assaults on foreign students -- prompted her to tell the former cricketer the story of the Australian funeral home which had tried to fulfill the hawker`s final wish.

"He said, `I am really touched by what the Guyett family has done and I would like to do this,`" she told AFP.

The story of Pooran Singh, who spent the last four decades of his life travelling between country towns selling goods from a horse-drawn wagon, was taken up by Indian media last month and his relatives traced to Punjab and England.

Manpreet Singh said it was discovered that relatives were living in a house built with the money he had sent home from Victoria and which bore an inscription saying it was that of Pooran Singh of Australia.

BDST:1600hrs, July 25, 2010