She was kidnapped from her Mumbai school in 2013. Now, Pooja is finally home

It was a video call that Poonam Santosh Gaud had given up hope of ever receiving after nine long years of waiting.

On the other end was Pooja, her daughter who went missing in January 2013 outside her Mumbai school in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, when she was only seven years old. 

She was taken by a couple who promised to buy her ice cream and then took her to another state, Pooja told her mother, forcing her to work and earn money for them. Mumbai police have arrested Hari D'Souza and his wife, Soni, and a spokesperson said they could face charges of kidnapping, wrongful confinement, and flouting child labour laws. 

"I could see tears in my mother's eyes," Pooja said, of the moment that she realized she had found her real family. 

Her mother still finds it hard to fully express her happiness at her only daughter's "miraculous" return in early August, saying she now feels alive instead of dead inside. 

"When I wake up in the morning and see my three kids together, it feels so good," Gaud, 30, said. "To be able to see Pooja in front of my eyes." 

It's big shift after years of waking up racked with constant worry and unanswered questions. "Two of my kids are with me, but where is she? Is Pooja even alive? It would just be those thoughts." 

Pooja was alive but she said she grew more and more terrified of the couple, who, she alleged, would threaten to hurt her if she cried out or drew attention to herself, and later began regularly beating her.

"His wife would hit me for every single thing," she told CBC News. "Sometimes with a rolling pin, sometimes with a belt, and she would use really abusive harsh language." 

"Once she hit me so much that my head started bleeding," Pooja recounted. "I only realized [how bad it was] when someone told me that my clothes were soaked in blood." 

The teenager believes she was kidnapped because the couple did not have a child and desperately wanted one, but once the woman gave birth, their treatment of her worsened. 

At first, Pooja was only made to do all of the housework in their home but after the lockdown imposed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, she said the couple forced her to work as a cleaner and nanny in other locations, taking all her wages. 

"I felt like I was in jail," Pooja said, recalling how she was confined to the house, only able to leave to go to her place of work and, occasionally, the market. 

"There was no way to escape," she said. "I had to stay because I couldn't remember anything about where I used to live when I was a child."