A Muslim youth who worked for a Jewish couple, cooking orthodox kosher food for dozens of Jews each week, Zakir Hussain, or “Jackie” to the world, is still struggling to come to terms with the worst night of his life — the terror attack on the Chabad House Jewish centre in which his employers, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka, were killed.

While the story of Sandra Samuels, the Holtzbergs’ nanny who was in the building and managed to escape with their two-year-old son Moshe, has made international headlines, the ordeal of Zakir Hussain, who shared her 13-hour ordeal standing between two refrigerators while intermittent firing continued, is little known. Zakir is in hiding on the advice of investigators.

Breaking his silence in a telephone interview to The Sunday Express, he said: “We never believed anybody could harm our saheb. I kept thinking that if those people wanted money, saheb would give it to them and ensure the safety of the guests, madam and Moshe.”

Zakir, 23, belongs to Banga, a small village in Badarpur, Assam, and came to Mumbai like lakhs of others, looking for a job and a better life. He started off as a helper in a grocery store until the opportunity to work for the Rabbi and his wife came up. So he learnt to cook kosher meals and became ‘Jackie’ for the hundreds of Jews who stopped by at Chabad House. Kosher food is food prepared as prescribed by Jewish dietary laws. It covers the kinds of meat that can be consumed, the method in which animals have to be butchered and cooked, and ingredients that can be used, among others.

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