Even the opportunity came purely by chance. Sandra was working elsewhere in Colaba when a friend who was working for the Holtzbergs asked Sandra to work in her place while she went away for a break. She never came back. That was in 2003, when Sandra joined the Holtzbergs as a kitchen-help to assist Rivka in cooking kosher meals for the hordes of Jewish guests stopping by at Chabad House. Two years ago, when Moshe was born, she switched to being his full-time nanny.

Sandra talks about her past in starts. She has a brother and a father in Chennai but hasn’t been in touch with them for many years. She ran away from home at 14 or 15, went to Goa and then to Pune, where she trained as an ayurvedic masseuse and worked for years. Then she moved to Mumbai and fell in love with the city, like millions others, as she worked for some 20 years as a maid in the houses of naval officers in the Colaba Naval Station. She even moved to Delhi briefly with the family of a naval officer but hated the city and returned. And the flight to Israel was not her first time on a plane. She had been taken to Spain for a week to accompany an elderly person she had been giving regular massages to. “I don’t want to go too much into my past,” she says, shaking her head. “The present is enough.”

The matter-of-fact attitude does not stop there. Husband John Samuel, a mechanic at an auto garage in Mahalaxmi and originally from Kerala, died of heart attack at the age of 52 in June this year. “But that is life,” she shrugs. Older son Martin, 25, is a graduate and works at a call centre in a Mumbai suburb. He has a Hindu girlfriend for the last four years and they are to marry soon and Sandra speaks to them over the phone almost every day. Younger son Jackson is 18 and is in class 11, although she can’t remember the name of the school he goes to. She stuck to her job because paying the house rent of Rs 3,000 was her responsibility. Life has become tough for her boys now as she isn’t in Mumbai to visit home two or three times a week and cook for them. "But they are grown up. They have to fend for themselves,” she says.

... contd.