Adopted sisters from New Zealand come looking for saviour cop

Adopted children, when they grow up, often feel the urge to track down their biological parents, but two sisters from New Zealand travelled to Pune recently to meet a police constable.

For it was this policeman who had picked them up from the roadside where their biological parents had abandoned them.

Seema Zeenath (24) and Reema Saziya (23) landed at Deccan Gymkhana police station alongwith their adoptive parents Tuesday.

They not only wanted to meet the policeman who had found them, but also see the police station where he had brought them.

"Our records showed that Sarjerao Kamble, who retired in 2007 as assistant sub-inspector, had found these two sisters abandoned on the roadside on April 25, 1998. One of them was two years old, another was three," said senior police inspector Bhaskar Jadhav of Deccan Gymkhana police.

Kamble, then a constable, searched for their parents, and not finding them, handed the girls over to Shreevatsa, a child-care centre run by the Society of Friends of the Sassoon Hospital (SOFOSH).

The sisters, named Seema and Reema at the orphanage, were later adopted by a couple from Wellington, New Zealand.

"The two sisters and their adoptive parents had visited Shreevatsa twice earlier. But they had not sought to know how the sisters landed at the centre as kids," said Sharmila Sayyad, the administration in-charge at SOFOSH.

"This time, before coming to Pune, they requested for the details and expressed a wish to meet Kamble," she said.

While Seema is a teacher now, Reema works as an engineer, she said.

Unfortunately, they could not meet the retired policeman before leaving for New Zealand.

"Kamble is 73 years old now. We tried to get in touch with him and found he was out of town," inspector Jadhav said.