They giggled like sisters at 15, then lost each other and waited 29 years

Two infants come to Netherlands

Meena and Minal’s story sits inside a much larger transnational adoption network across India and the Netherlands. Between 1995 and 2006, the period when Meena and Minal were brought to the Netherlands, at least 594 children were adopted from India to the country, according to the government agency Statistics Netherlands (CBS).

A 2021 CBS study, part of a Dutch government investigation into inter-country adoption from 1967 to 1998, surveyed 3,454 adult adoptees from India and seven other countries. At 20% of all adoptions, Indian babies formed the largest cohort in that period. Nearly half of the India-born adoptees (47.9%) had actively searched for their origins, hoping to trace their roots, find birth relatives, or simply learn if they had siblings. Yet, only 15.1% found what they were looking for.

Baby Meena is being brought out of the flight by a stewardess after she lands in Amsterdam. Credit: Meena Geltink A family photo of Meena with her parents in the Netherlands.
Credit: Meena Geltink Meena during her early days in the Netherlands. Credit: Meena Geltink

Four months after Meena was born — she does not know the date, except that it was in Mumbai in 1983 — she arrived at Schiphol airport with five other Indian infants, each delivered into the arms of a waiting family.

She was the only one of the six infants who got to keep her birth name. “My parents told me, ‘You’ve already lost so much…we don’t want to take away your name’,” says Meena in one of multiple conversations with The Indian Express. Meena, 43, now celebrates October 25, the day she was handed over to Joke and Henk Geltink, as her birthday.

Four years later, the Geltinks adopted another child, her brother Ashok, from Goa. A photograph of Meena, her hair tied in pigtails and standing behind a glass window at Schiphol, much like her mother Joke had some years ago, has a caption that reads: “’t Vliegtuig is geland. aan papa en mama zeggen dat in dat vliegtuig Ashok zit.” In English, “The airplane has landed. Just tell Dad and Mom that Ashok is on that airplane.”

Growing up, Meena was surrounded by all good things — family, friends, school and sport. She played competitive volleyball and tennis and did gymnastics at a higher level.

In the photographs from Meena’s childhood, the life around her looks unhurried, calm — the family doing what families do.

In one, Meena is with her mother and brother at a roadside stop, eating sandwiches out of a cooler, her knees drawn up to her chest, the last bite frozen in her hand. Behind them, the family’s red car is parked with the rear door open.

Meena with her father Henk Geltink.
Credit: Meena Geltink Meena waits at the Schiphol Airport for her brother Ashok to arrive from India.
Credit: Meena Geltink Meena reads with her father Henk. Credit: Meena Geltink Meena rests her head on her mother Joke’s shoulder.
Credit: Meena Geltink

In another photograph, Meena is with her father (“he was my world”) and brother on a rowboat. A wooden footbridge curves over the canal behind them. Meena and her brother are grinning, she through the gaps left by a few missing baby teeth.

There are many more — of her lying in the crook of her father’s arm as he reads out to her; one of Meena resting her head on her mother’s shoulder, but stealing a glance at the camera, in the middle of a tiring orchestra performance.

Despite the unconditional love she got from home, Meena says her growing up days were “quietly disorienting”.

By the time she was 14, the safety of her childhood had begun to coexist with something much harder to explain.

“I was really angry about my adoption,” she says. “Very much busy with my identity… It was hard, I felt really lonely because I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it,” she says.

It didn’t help that she stood out in the white neighbourhood. “I was dealing with my skin colour because of all the white people around me. The music I loved was also different. I couldn’t see myself in my parents. And they were not like me.”

So when Meena decided to search for answers about who she was and where she came from, her parents stood by her.

At 19, she traveled to India for the first time as part of a trip organised by the adoption agency. More than 20 adoptive families and their children split into groups bound for Mumbai, Goa, Kolkata, later reconvening for the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur leg of the tour.

Meena with her father Henk at a farm in the Netherlands. Credit: Meena Geltink Meena, Henk and Ashok on a rowboat during an outing. Credit: Meena Geltink Meena and Ashok have frozen sandwiches during a picnic with their mother. Credit: Meena Geltink

The trip did not get her any answers but deepened what she felt as a teenager. “I am an Indian woman, but in India, I was always feeling really Dutch.” Strangers on the street looked at her clothes, her camera. She began saving the bread and fruit from her breakfast to hand out on the streets, overwhelmed by guilt she couldn’t fully name.

“Someone saw my photo, adopted me and took me to the Netherlands,” she remembers thinking. “But what if I hadn’t been adopted? I would have been living in India. Maybe I would have been here on the streets.”

She left India more uncertain of where she belonged than when she had arrived. “I was an outsider in the Netherlands because I didn’t fit in, but I also was an outsider in India,” she says.

That trip included an attempt to search for information about her birth family, but she found no answers. She knew no more of herself than what her adoptive parents had told her — that her birth mother was young and unmarried, and that Meena was born with a heart condition for which she was sent to a nursing home in Mumbai before eventually being transferred to an orphanage from where she was adopted.

Her brother, however, took a different route. Though he was aware of his adoption, he told himself that the Geltinks were his biological parents and was content.

A few villages away, in Made, Minal grew up with her mother, a primary-school teacher, and father, who managed a family car garage. Like Meena, she now had a younger brother, whom the Tijssens had adopted from an orphanage in India. She also excelled at many of the same sports that Meena played.

Baby Minal smiles at the camera.
Credit: Minal Tijssen Minal grew up in Made with the Tijssens. Credit: Minal Tijssen A 1986 photograph of Minal at a Dutch holiday resort, Kempervennen. Credit: Minal Tijssen

A 1986 photograph has Minal, with the broadest of smiles, perched on a rope swing at a Dutch holiday resort, Kempervennen.

“My adoptive parents were really gentle with me. I had friends at school and it was all normal and nice. I did not think about my roots as much when I was younger, but the feeling started sinking in as I grew older,” says Minal, 44, speaking from her home in Quimper, a city in Brittany, northwestern France, to where she moved over a decade ago.

“I felt different not because I was adopted, but because I didn’t look like the other Dutch girls or boys. I was Indian. Even shampoos and other products in Dutch stores were made for blonde hair… These things were very difficult to explain. I was always the smallest person, and people made jokes about it but it got very tiring in the end. People thought I was a cute, small person, the little dark one on the hockey field. But I would have preferred not to be the different one.”

Her parents never hid the adoption. “There were no secrets about my adoption,” she says. “They would call me eagerly whenever there were Indian programmes playing on television.”

But Minal would hide instead. “I was always hiding, I didn’t want to see it, because it was like, I won’t be able to go to India anyway.” She could not explain the loneliness she felt.

While Meena spent her adolescence trying to find the country and people she had come from, Minal spent hers trying not to think about them. She carried her questions deep inside her.

Neither knew that the answer was less than two hours away.

‘We called each other sis’

In the late 1990s, the two girls, now teenagers, met at a weekend retreat nearly three decades ago organised by the Dutch agency that had facilitated their adoption— one of the annual gatherings that the agency still holds, bringing together children and their adoptive families for a weekend that typically ends with a day at an amusement park. Minal was 15 when her mother signed her up, hoping it might eventually prepare her for a trip back to India if she ever decided to.

“I did not want to go, so I brought a friend along to keep me company,” Minal says.

Meena, too, arrived with a friend.

Meena first spotted Minal in the shared shower building where a group of teenagers was washing up before dinner. She noticed the nose, the laugh, the way Minal moved — all uncannily familiar to her.

“I saw her, she saw me, and we giggled and laughed and thought, ‘Oh my gosh’,” says Meena.

Meena and her mother at a gathering. Credit: Meena Geltink Meena and Minal in a picture from when they first met at a weekend retreat. Credit: MyHeritage

Minutes later, seated across from each other at the dinner table, Meena couldn’t stop staring. Minal, for her part, had no idea what to make of it. She had spent years averting her eyes from Indian faces on television. Now here was an actual Indian face, sitting a few feet away, staring back. It was unsettling.

“What is she doing?” Minal remembers thinking. Her friend leaned over and said, “Minal, she really looks like you.” Meena’s friend said the same to her. So did some of the older teenagers at the table, who suggested that the girls go look at themselves in a mirror.

Meena spent the following day in a state of low panic, unable to find Minal in the crowded amusement park, realising too late that she had no address or phone number for her. She searched for hours, before finding Minal at a balloon stand. The two exchanged addresses, said their goodbyes and went their ways. From then on, they called each other “sis” — a playful nickname that stuck.

“Meena told us she met a girl who looked like her. She even showed us a picture of them together. They did look alike, but we never thought it was remotely possible that they could be related. We never acted upon it, regrettably,” her mother Joke, now 77, says.

Over the next several years after they met at the weekend retreat, the girls wrote each other a couple of letters and made the occasional phone call. Then, life happened and like most teenage friendships, theirs faded away.

By their early twenties, the two young women, who once stood in front of a mirror giggling about how alike they looked, were in separate countries.

The years apart

Meena is now a mother to three — 15-year-old Noah; daughter Femm, who is almost 13; and seven-year-old Jazz, whom the family calls Delhi. After separating from her husband, Meena now lives with her children and partner Jeroen.

Over the years, Meena grew close to a wider community of Indian adoptees in the Netherlands. It was through them that she began to understand how dangerous unmanaged longing could be. She had watched friends spiral. “I know a lot of adoptees who took their own lives.”

Holding on to her own newborn son for the first time, Meena says, she found herself thinking of the woman who had given her up. “Oh my gosh, how can you give up a child like that?” she recalls thinking. “I looked at Noah and thought, “I don’t know if I can live with the fact that I can’t see you anymore.’ I was not angry with my biological mother, but I felt so sad for her because of what she went through. The pain she must have felt while she was walking away… Maybe she was forced to do it. I don’t know.”

Meena poses for a photo with her mother Joke. Credit: Meena Geltink A recent mother-daughter photo. Credit: Meena Geltink Meena with her partner Jeroen. credit: Meena Geltink

Meena then resolved to draw a boundary around how much of her emotional life she would let India occupy, “otherwise I don’t know what will happen”.

A DNA test, taken in 2017 and logged with a genealogy database, became her compromise, “the safest thing I could do”, a way of staying tethered to the possibility of finding family without letting the search consume her family life.

“I didn’t want my children to say, ‘Mama was not at home because she is always busy with India,'” she says. When years passed without a match, she gave up, and deleted the app to free up space on her phone.

Minal’s arc ran in an entirely opposite direction.

She married a Frenchman, Eric, a plumbing teacher whom she met while on holiday in France. In 2007, she moved to the French village of Quimper, on the far western coast. The couple have two sons, 14 and 16.

Minal’s first trip to India came in 2004 when she was 21, a group tour organised by the adoption agency, the trip that finally cracked open the questions she had spent her adolescence deflecting.

The group visited her orphanage but all she came back with was a suggestion the staff there gave her, “Don’t look back. Look to the future…It was the only thing anyone told me there,” she recalls.

She came home and, briefly, indulged in the Bollywood DVDs, Indian clothes and music that she brought back to the Netherlands.

The memories resurfaced last year, in 2025, when Geltink and her family visited Mumbai, Madurai and Kerala. The visit to her old orphanage this time was even more unsettling than the first: the group was welcomed and then, she says, rushed out, with no time allotted for questions.

She began searching social media for anything that might fill in the blanks. Not long afterward, while visiting her parents in the Netherlands this past April, she finally took a DNA test on MyHeritage, a platform that uses algorithms to scan their database and find matching blocks of DNA between users.

Through these years, both women were also living with a shared physical burden: sickle cell disease, inherited, as they would later discover, from their birth parents.

Meena was diagnosed at age 16, when her parents grew alarmed that she couldn’t keep pace with them on a family hike in Austria. By 33, doctors in the Netherlands determined she could no longer hold her job as a teaching assistant for children with disabilities.

Minal was told at 15 that she had only inherited a genetic trait, not the full disease, and would likely be spared its worst effects. She also lives with ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory condition she manages with strong medication, and works a reduced schedule of roughly 24 hours a week as a special-needs teaching assistant, alongside volunteering and part-time work as a hockey coach.

The match and a reunion

Minal’s DNA results came on May 20, 2026. The system cross-referenced her genetic markers against its full database, matching her to a 2017 file containing Meena’s details.

Minutes later, on the evening of May 20, Meena stared at the message that had slid into her phone: a screenshot of a DNA-match notification from MyHeritage captioned Soeur, ‘sister’ in French.

The French word swam past her but she recognised the profile photo — Minal, the girl from the teenagers’ weekend retreat 15 years ago. A text followed, “Hi Meena, do you remember me? It’s Minal.”

Was Minal saying the app had matched them as sisters? Could this be true? Meena tried logging back into the MyHeritage app to check for herself. She had deleted the app years earlier.

“My hands were shaking so bad that I typed the wrong password multiple times in a row,” Meena says.

When she finally logged in, there it was: a DNA-match notification of her own, confirming what Minal had already seen. A 100% probability of a full-sister relationship — 36.5% shared DNA, the precise percentage of two people who share both a mother and a father.

“I broke down on the couch and called my mother,” says Meena.

Meena and Minal during their last reunion. Credit: Reuters The sisters pose for a photo with their respective partners during the reunion. Credit: Reuters The sisters during the reunion. credit: Reuters

According to Margaux Stelman, a spokesperson for MyHeritage, the platform’s algorithm compares DNA segments and measures the total centimorgans, a genetic unit that measures the probability of genetic recombination to flag likely relatives.

“What makes Meena and Minal’s story so unique is the unbelievable chain of coincidences, paired with the ultimate proof that when paper trails vanish, DNA doesn’t lie,” Stelman told The Indian Express, while citing other successful DNA matches.

After the DNA match, Meena and Minal, and their partners, met at a park in Den Bosch, a city in southern Netherlands.

For Meena, the reunion resolved a long-standing question. “I found that missing piece of my puzzle,” she says. She is still curious about her birth parents, “but now, I feel so much rest. If it stays this way, I am happy with that too”.

For Minal, the reunion came with a tinge of regret. “I’m very happy to be here now, but also very sad. Why did I not have this before? I could have been there for Meena before. For myself too. Though I was surrounded by parents, family and friends, I have always felt very lonely. I didn’t know what this feeling was. But now I know it was my sister who I needed, and that she needed me.”

The two families spent the next two weeks together, watching in marvel as their children fell into an instant, unforced comfort with each other.

“They look exactly the same…All the children. My daughter Femm resembles both me and her aunt (Minal). The kids went swimming together and played beach volleyball like they had known each other forever,” Meena says.

On a text message from Wilp, Meena’s mother Joke Geltink, says, “Meena was super happy. She has found peace. She found a big piece of her past and her origin, her kin.”

It was as if Joke had been standing by that glass window all along, waiting, watching her daughter, the four-month-old swaddled in a green-and-white bundle, grow up and fight with herself for years to find a part of her. Joke isn’t complaining. “It means the world to me! I gained a bonus daughter in Minal.”

Minal and Meena with their children. Credit: Minal Tijssen

Her husband Henk, who was with Meena when she first met Minal at the weekend retreat decades ago, died on June 17, 2021, after battling Alzheimer’s disease. “My father could not live to see us reunite, he was my whole world,” says Meena.

Since life, both spectacular and prosaic, must go on, the two sisters are now back with their families, cherishing the heady joy of the reunion. They hope to someday travel to India together — to walk side by side through the streets of Mumbai.

To other adoptees, who, like them, might be struggling with unresolved questions about their identity, Meena recommends a DNA test. “Take it. You never know. You might just find family.”