LONDON — When the news spread this week that Britain would send back to India its “best junior chess prospect in a generation,” more than a few people were astonished. But on Friday, British authorities appeared to change their minds, saying they may allow the 9-year-old prodigy, Shreyas Roya, and his family to stay in the country after all.

“Shreyas’s jumping and dancing,” the boy’s father, Jitendra Singh, said in an email. “Tears came out from my wife’s eyes.”

The family’s future in Britain had seemed bleak. The five-year visa that Mr. Singh, an information technology manager, had been granted to work for Tata Consultancy Services in Britain could not be extended once it expired in September.

Britain’s Home Office said there could be no exception. “There is no route within the immigration rules which would allow the family to remain in the U.K.,” a spokesman for the Home Office said Thursday.