A day before Ambassador Meera Shankar was to return home after completing her tenure in the US in the summer of 2011, her maid, without informing anyone, left her official residence on the outskirts of Washington never to return.

The highly-secretive Indian Embassy in Washington hushed up the matter from the media and is believed to have registered a formal complaint with police and the State Department, in addition to cancelling the maid's official passport.

The woman domestic worker, who served the Ambassador quite well during her tenure of more than two years in Washington, is still untraceable and believed to be living illegally in the US. And she is not the only Indian maid - officially called "India-Based Domestic Assistant" - to have fled from the homes of senior Indian diplomats in the past few years.

Sources familiar with such incidents said that the number of such maids or India-Based Domestic Assistants (IBDAs) from the Indian Embassy in Washington - one of the largest Indian diplomatic missions - could be at least a dozen in the past decade.