Fifteen minutes after noon, on June 20, the phone rang in an affluent Indian home in distant Jeddah. “Unga appa uyiroda irukkirar (Your father is alive),” said the voice from Chennai. Naseema Sayad, 32, couldn’t reply, she broke down.

That phone call had changed her life forever. She had found her father, after 24 years.

At the other end, the private detective handed over the phone to Ibrahim Sherrif, 65, deaf and mute, working as a cleaner in a small eat-out near the bustling town square in Arcot, near Vellore, 130 km north of Chennai.

“He cannot hear nor speak. But I am sure he heard my voice,” Naseema told The Sunday Express on phone from Jeddah. “He began to utter noises. I understood how he felt.”

It’s an incredible story that’s just entered the last, happy chapter. Of a poor widower whose youngest and “favourite” daughter was whisked away by a relative and “sold” to a couple in Chennai for household work. Of an eight-year-old, youngest of three, who was later sheltered, educated by a Brahmin couple from Mysore. Of her husband, moved by her tears over the years, who got in touch with a detective agency in Chennai.

But really, it’s the story of Ibrahim Sherrif, now waiting for his passport, a small, shabby worn-out cloth bag crammed with his belongings, ready to board a flight to Saudi Arabia. To live with his daughter, once again.

“The story begins 24 years ago when Sheriff, then earning his living by rolling beedis in Kanchipuram, struggled to look after his three daughters, Mumtaz, Shamshad and Naseema, after his wife Rohaya Bee died of tuberculosis,”’ says R Varadaraj, Director, Sun Detective agency, who made that phone call to Jeddah last month.

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