On the afternoon of January 22 in 2013, a couple, longing for a child of their own, saw a seven-year-old girl outside a school in Andheri and took her home. Meanwhile, Pooja Gaud’s family was searching the neighbourhood when she didn’t return home. While the police and her family continued their search over the past nine years, the ‘kidnappers’ moved, unknowingly, to the girl’s original locality and yet they never came face to face. It was a phone call on Thursday that finally reunited them.

For years, the girl’s family, relatives, neighbours and police looked for her but in vain. Her uncle Vinod told mid-day that three years after she went missing, her father Santosh passed away in the hope of meeting his daughter once again. Nine and a half years later, a call from an unknown number ended the family’s grief.