Lost in a Swiss dream, she wakes up to her UP village

‘‘I will come back and I cannot describe my feelings meeting my family after so many years,’’ she said before she walked away to the plane. ‘‘We never thought even in our wildest dreams that we will meet our poor girl who we lost in 1980,’’ said Muhammad Rafi, her father.

Her story is stranger than fiction. When she was six, she was abducted by her maternal uncle from their house in Madiaon in Jaunpur district. He took her to the Varanasi railway station where she managed to break free and jump on to a running train. The train took her to Calcutta.

The next morning, policemen spotted a weeping child and took her to a home for destitutes. She could not tell them where she was from. A few months later, a childless Swiss couple adopted her and took her to Switzerland.

She studied, grew up, got married but memories of a lost childhood came back to haunt her. All she could remember was that she had been in a family which cooked only at night for a month a year. She remembered her father was a barber and her mother rubbed potato on a burn on her leg. And a woman prime minister had once visited a village nearby.

A Gujarati family in Switzerland gave her the first clue about her initial religion. ‘‘You could be a Muslim as they cook meals at nights during Ramzan,’’ they told her.

She then wrote to the Delhi Police early last year with the request to help her trace her biological parents. Delhi’s DCP M S Upadhyaya — he is now Deputy Inspector General, Western range, Arunachal Pradesh — gave out the details in a press briefing and it was published in a magazine. Her father was told by a friend and suggested it could be the daughter he lost in 1980.

The father wrote to the police official who passed the information on to Shezadi. But her foster parents refused to give her permission to meet the family till they got confirmation through DNA test. The process of tracing the family and taking the samples took a year. The samples were tested at Verocili clinic in Switzerland and the findings confirmed that the Rafis were Shezadi’s biological parents.

She reached her native village along with her husband on July 16 and remained there for a fortnight. ‘‘While seeing off my daughter at the airport, I had the feeling of being part of the bidai ceremony of my daughter who was married abroad,’’ said Rafi who has a son and two other daughters.

When The Indian Express called Upadhyaya, he said: ‘‘A friend, who studied with me in Amravati, brought the matter to my notice. I asked for details and passed them on to newspapers and magazines. Somebody read that story and called me with information. I followed the case religiously. We put the details together and the stories matched. I am told that Shezadi is in India. It is a very happy moment for me. I am glad we could bring a family together.’’