Childhood friends discover they're biological sisters through DNA test

Meena Geltink was thirteen years old when she first saw Minal Tijssen across a room full of adopted children gathered by their agency in the Netherlands. They had been born in Mumbai in the early 1980s, taken from two different orphanages within months of each other, and raised by separate Dutch families in the same country. Neither knew the other existed until that evening. What struck them both immediately was the uncanny mirror of their faces—the same nose, the same laugh, the way they moved. Friends pointed it out. They pointed it out to each other. By the end of the night, they had exchanged phone numbers and addresses.

For the next fifteen years, they wrote letters. They called each other "Sis" because it felt true, even though they had no reason to believe it was. They shared the ordinary intimacies of adolescence: crushes, school troubles, music they loved—both of them were devoted to the Backstreet Boys. Then life scattered them. Minal moved to France. Meena had her first child and the correspondence simply stopped. Thirty years passed. They did not see each other or speak.

In 2017, Meena attended a gathering of Indian adoptees and heard about DNA testing. She took a test but found no matches, and eventually deleted the app to free up phone storage. Then on May 20 of this year, Minal sent her a message on Facebook. "Remember me?" she asked, and attached a screenshot of her DNA results. Minal had taken the test in April while visiting her parents in the Netherlands. Meena reinstalled the app with trembling hands, entering her password wrong ten times before she could log in. The result was unambiguous: a one hundred percent match. They shared the same biological mother and father. "It was like I had an adrenalin shot," Meena said later. "I cried. Minal was my missing puzzle piece."

When they met in person in August on a clear day, it felt to Meena like homecoming. They embraced. They laughed. They cried. They took their first photograph together as sisters—a fact they had intuited for three decades but could only confirm through science. Minal, now forty-four and living in France with her partner and two sons, had not immediately recognized Meena's name when the DNA results came through. It was only when she looked at old photographs on social media that the recognition struck her: this was the girl she had clung to at that first meeting. "We were friends before we were sisters," Minal said. "We were sisters the whole time, but we didn't know."

Meena grew up in a small village in the Netherlands with parents who taught at a private school—they were also her teachers. She describes them as loving and trusting. Her father died a few years ago, but her mother remains in the same village, and they speak every day. At nineteen, Meena had traveled to the Mumbai orphanage with her parents and her brother, who had been adopted from Goa, hoping to find information about her biological parents. The orphanage refused to share any details. Now, with Minal, she has found something she did not know she was searching for.

Since May, the sisters have spoken every other day. They have met each other's spouses, children, and parents. They finish each other's sentences. They move the same way. They walk the same way. Meena, now forty-three and a mother of three, says the fact of their sisterhood is still sinking in—sometimes they talk for two hours and lose track of time, suddenly remembering they need to pick up children from school or buy groceries. There is a regret in her voice when she speaks about the years they were apart. "There were times when we both felt very lonely," she says. "Like when I lost my dad or went through a heartbreak. I regret we couldn't be with each other. We could have shared happiness, helped each other in tough times." What they want now is to return together to where it began—to walk through the streets of Mumbai side by side, to see the city that gave them life and then separated them, and to do it as sisters who finally know what they always felt.