Best friends for decades - until a DNA test revealed they were sisters

Theirs is a story straight out of a Bollywood film.

Two Indian-born women in their 40s, adopted as babies by different families and raised near each other in the Netherlands, have now discovered they are biological sisters.

Meena Geltink and Minal Tijssen, born in the early 1980s, were adopted from two different orphanages in the western Indian city of Mumbai within months of their birth.

When they first met in their early teens at an event hosted by the adoption agency their parents had used, they were struck by the uncanny similarities in their appearance and mannerisms.

Meena, now 43, remembers the day clearly.

"All the adopted children were brought together to hang out and bond and have dinner."

Both Meena and Minal were with friends who noticed how similar they looked.

"They said, 'Look at yourselves in the mirror'.

"And I was like, 'Oh my God, she has my nose! We have the same laugh'.

"At dinner, I kept looking at her the whole time," Meena told the BBC from her home in the Netherlands.

The following day, the girls exchanged telephone numbers and addresses and promised to keep in touch.

Even though there was no indication they were related by blood, their connection was instant, and for years they wrote each other letters, often addressing each other as "Sis" because "we felt that way".

They wrote about school, friends, boys, going out and dancing. They told each other about the sports they played and discussed music, discovering they both loved Backstreet Boys.

Then 15 years ago, they lost contact. Minal had moved to France. And Meena had recently had her first child and got busy.

In 2017, Meena attended another meeting of adoptees from India where she heard about DNA testing and decided to take a test herself. But she never found any matches and earlier this year, deleted the app because her phone storage was full. Then on 20 May, Meena received a message from Minal on Facebook.

"'Remember me?' she asked.

Minal had taken a DNA test in April while visiting her parents in the Netherlands and attached a screengrab of her test result.

"I reinstalled the app. I was so nervous I entered wrong passwords 10 times before I was able to log in," Meena says.

The result couldn't have been clearer - the two women were "a 100% match".

"I had a 'full sister' which means we shared the same biological mother and father," Meena explains. "It was like I had an adrenalin shot. I cried. Minal was my missing puzzle piece I had waited so long for. We had called each other sister.

"This DNA match was the confirmation that all our intuition was right."

On a fine sunny day in August the old friends met for the first time since discovering they were sisters.

"It was amazing. It felt like homecoming," Meena, now a mother to three children, says. "For years, Minal and I had felt a big hole in our hearts. We feel like we've been completed. Everything now feels like it's supposed to be."

Reporting on their "emotional reunion", Reuters said "tears, hugs ​and laughter punctuated their ​meeting... followed by their first selfie together".

Minal, 44, who lives in France with her partner and two sons, told the agency that when her ⁠DNA results came in April, she had initially not realised her match was the same teenage girl who had clung to her when ​they first met 30 years ago.

It only sank in when she looked at her photos on social media. "'Meena: Sister.' I couldn't believe it. We were friends before we were sisters.

"We were sisters the whole time," she said, "but we didn't know."

Meena and Minal were adopted from different orphanages by two different Dutch couples.

Meena says she grew up in a small village in the Netherlands by parents who taught at a private school.

"They were also my teachers," she says. "They were very loving people, very trusting."

Her father died a few years ago, but her mother continues to live in the same village. "We talk every day. She's still my safe space," she adds.

In 2003, aged 19, Meena had visited the orphanage in Mumbai with her parents and her brother who was adopted from Goa.

They spent two weeks looking through records, trying to find out about Meena's biological parents "because for me it was important to know where I came from. But the orphanage would not reveal any details about them," she says.

• 'Meeting my mother after 42 years was a miracle'

Since May, Meena and Minal have been speaking every other day. They've met each other's spouses, children, brothers and parents.

"Everyone notices how we finish each other's sentences, how we move our heads or walk similar," Meena says.

The fact they are siblings is still sinking in, she says.

"Sometimes we talk for two hours and lose track of time, suddenly remembering that we have to do groceries or pick up children from school."

One thing she and her sister would "love to do", Meena says, is return to the place where it all began.

"We'd love to go to India together sometime, to walk through the streets of Mumbai together.

"There were times when we both felt very lonely, like when I lost my dad or went through a heartbreak," she says.

"I regret we couldn't be with each other - we could have shared happiness, helped each other in tough times."