Meena and Minal: 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.