Chennai, July 8: The man making the call to Saudi Arabia was speech-impaired, but that wasn’t the reason the gathering of journalists was agog with curiosity.

Mohammed Ibrahim, a 65-year-old eatery worker, had just made contact with his lost daughter after 24 years and across thousands of miles.

The old man could only let out incomprehensible cries as he pressed his ear against the cellphone handed to him yesterday by the city detective who had traced him.

But the journalists invited by the private detective agency, hired by Ibrahim’s well-to-do daughter from Saudi Arabia, were hanging on to every word Nazeema spoke, coming loud and clear through a speaker.

“Appa, I will soon come to take you back with me,” the 32-year-old was saying.

Separated from her father at eight, with her lone clear memory of Ibrahim being the way he carried her on his shoulder to school, Nazeema had never given up hope. She didn’t even remember the name of their town — Kancheepuram. Yet, there had been too many miracles in her life for her to lose faith.

Nazeema, who lost her mother at birth, was brought up by her paternal grandmother along with her elder sisters Mumtaz and Samsuda. But what their father earned by rolling beedis wasn’t enough to feed five people and, after the eldest sister was married off, their grandmother sent the other two to work as housemaids.

“I still remember the stricken look in your (Ibrahim’s) face when granny sent me away,” a sobbing Nazeema recalled.

She was eight, and never saw her father again. Soon, she fled the home of her policeman employer in Chennai, unable to bear the beatings by his wife.

Over the next few years she had got used to living on the streets of Chennai, working for roadside vendors — with breaks as domestic help in between — when the first miracle happened.

A Kannadiga Brahmin couple took pity on the Tamil Muslim girl and took her home. They brought her up as their own daughter and, when she turned 21, married her off to an educated Muslim boy.

The young couple later migrated to Saudi Arabia where Nazeema’s husband is a business consultant. But despite the comfortable life with their two children, a gnawing pain wouldn’t leave Nazeema. “Not a day would pass without me thinking of you and crying for you,” she told her father.

It was her husband who suggested she try a detective agency in Chennai.

“It was a tough assignment,” conceded R. Varadaraj, who runs the Sun Detective Intelligence Network India. “The tidbits Nazeema could remember were of no help.”

But Varadaraj had been a policeman and his former colleagues were now posted across the state. Weeks of search later, he traced Ibrahim to an eatery in Arcot, Vellore, where the old man cleaned the tables.

The agency has also tracked down Nazeema’s sisters, one in Kancheepuram and the other at Red Hills near Chennai. She will be flying down to the city soon to meet them and take her father away to Saudi Arabia.