Determination, help from a stranger and a large dose of luck: How two siblings reunited with their mother after 13 years

“A mother can never forget her children, whether they meet in 13 years or 30. I identified them the very first moment I saw them on video call. It has been a very long, painful journey, and the weight of my heart would have increased due to the immense pain, but I kept hope that god would listen to me one day,” Neetu, a construction worker, said.

The siblings don’t remember how they got lost from their Agra home and ended up on a train that took them to Meerut in 2010. In Meerut, officials noticed that they were unaccompanied and put them up in a shelter home.

“I was just nine years old then and my brother was six. I do not have any memory of the day we got separated from the family. I do not know why, but we somehow sat on a train that day and when the train arrived in Meerut, some official spotted us and they called the childline,” said Rakhi.

After around a year in Meerut, the siblings were separated, with Rakhi sent to a Noida shelter home and Babloo sent to one in Lucknow. When they got older, they started looking for each other, relentlessly contacting shelter homes. Two years ago, they reconnected when Babloo managed to locate his sister, having succeeded in getting her details from the shelter home.

In the meantime, Neetu had also been trying to find her children. She had filed a missing report soon after their disappearance in 2010. However, she says, she did not get help from anyone. Just a couple of years after the children went missing, her husband died.

“I thought that someone had abducted my children, and nobody helped me in finding them – not the police nor any neighbour. I did not have any idea what to do under such circumstances. I had filed a complaint and used to go to the police station with folded hands, but I did not get any help. Maa ki aatma kitni tadap rahi hogi, ye kisi ne nahi socha (No one thought about how much pain a mother would be going through in that situation). Later, my tears dried up, but I was determined to try out any lead,” Neetu said.

Her children had by now completed their schooling and found employment. Rakhi works at a retail store in Gurgaon, and Babloo works at a private company in Bengaluru. After reconnecting, they began looking for their mother together. While they did not have much luck at first, around 10 days ago, Babloo contacted Agra-based child rights activist Naresh Paras.

Paras decided to help them, but knew it would be difficult as the siblings did not have any information about their family.

Paras said, “He (Babloo) got me connected with his sister through a video call, and she told me that their mother had a burn mark on her neck. She (Rakhi) also knew the mother’s name, but was not very sure about it.”

He then got his hands on a letter that the Meerut shelter home had written to police stating that these two children were found in Meerut. However, the only information it had about them was that they were from Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, where Neetu was originally from.

Paras said that when he called up police in Bilaspur and found that they had no information about the children or Neetu, he had lost hope.

“But a few days later, Babloo told me that he remembered seeing an ‘old railway engine’ at the station where they got into a train. When I researched, I found that one such engine was kept at Agra Cantt station,” Paras said.

“This was the most helpful clue. I reached out to the police and found out that there was a missing complaint filed by a family in Jagdishpura police station (in Agra) in 2010. From there, I found Neetu’s address, but she had moved out of that house long ago,” the activist said.

However, this time, luck was with Neetu. A woman in Bilaspur, who knew Neetu’s cousin, had coincidentally gone to the same police station there that Paras had called to enquire about a separated family. This woman heard about the issue at the police station and told Neetu’s cousin about it. The cousin, who knew that Neetu’s children had gone missing years ago, reached out to her sister, who in turn informed Neetu.

This stroke of luck helped Neetu get Paras’s contact details from the police. Upon contacting Paras, he set up a video call between Neetu and her two children, during which they identified each other.

Rakhi said she was overwhelmed with emotion upon reuniting with her mother.

“I have mixed feelings. What can bring more happiness to a child than being able to meet her mother. However, it is very overwhelming also, and I am not able to think about what I should do next,” she said.

About her life in the shelter homes, she said it made her independent, but she also lamented the fact that she had no emotional support.

“In all these years, the unfortunate circumstances made me very independent, but I had no emotional support for so long. Of course, as you progress in life, you make friends, but nobody can fill this void. I am happy that I have got my mother at this age,” Rakhi said.

Babloo said his shelter home experience was much worse.

“I used to cry and hide myself. I saw bad things at a very early age. I cannot share everything with you, but they used to beat me a lot in the shelter home. It was a very bad place. I could not study because of them – I had to study in sixth class six times. They did not care about the children. Many from the staff used to beat children after getting drunk,” he said.

“I had this image of my mother, and when I was in pain, I would imagine that she was consoling me in her arms,” he said.

“Now that I have found my mother, I will never leave her. I will continue my studies and my dream is to help children so that they do not have to face what I have gone through,” Babloo said.