14 yrs on, woman finds lost family in UP

A 25-year-old woman, who went missing from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh when she was a child and accidentally landed in Mumbai, has found her family 14 years later.

Pooja Subodh Verma, who grew up in an orphanage in adjoining Navi Mumbai, was trying to find her parents for the last few years.

In 2003, while playing at the Ayodhya railway station, she accidentally boarded a Mumbai-bound train.

After reaching the metropolis, police spotted her, and sent her to an orphanage in Nerul. She was also enrolled in a school. In 2009, Pooja started working as a domestic help with Nitin and Sunita Gaikwad, a couple living in Nerul.

She remembered the names of her parents, Subodh and Meera, brother Alok, their house in Ayodhya near the Sarayu river and a Ram temple, and that her father owned a shop of garlands and audio cassettes, said Nitin.

With these scanty details, Nitin and local activist Girish Patil started the search for Pooja’s parents in Ayodhya by contacting Uttar Pradesh Police. Through some contacts they approached Santosh Tiwari of the Anti Terrorism Squad in Lucknow. Tiwari assigned the task of making inquiries to his men. Police looked for men who dealt in garlands and cassettes, and also went through voters’ lists in Ayodhya and Faizabad.

As the search operation was on, Pooja herself decided to visit Ayodhya earlier this month. On reaching Ayodhya on November 5, she started searching the areas along the banks of the Sarayu, and after a few hours, managed to locate her house at Naya Ghat and find her family.

A jubilant Pooja then called Gaikwad and Patil, informing that she had found her parents. “We were trying our best to locate Pooja’s family members... One day I got a call from Pooja about her reunion with her parents,” Tiwari told PTI.

A 25-year-old woman, who went missing from Ayodhya and accidentally landed in Mumbai, has now found her family