The life and times of Sunanda Pushkar are well chronicled: her early life in northern India, her move to Dubai and reported financial troubles, her three marriages and, most importantly, her last three years as a socialite in New Delhi married to a high-profile Indian minister.

But there is a blank.

Her five-year sojourn in the Toronto area.

Pushkar, 52, died of a drug overdose in New Delhi last week after alleging on Twitter that her husband, Shashi Tharoor, the junior human resources development minister, was having an affair with a Pakistani journalist.

Reaction: Indian minister’s wife found lifeless in New Delhi hotel

Pushkar was a Canadian citizen who moved to Toronto in 1999 along with her son. But what she did here for five years is a bit of a mystery.

“She never willingly talked about her life in Toronto,” said Jacob Joseph Puthenparambil, a digital media specialist in Singapore who was chief of staff for Tharoor from early 2009 to June 2010. “She didn’t talk about any friends in Toronto or what life had been there.”

She called Toronto “her place of refuge,” he added.

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The arc of life that brought Pushkar to Toronto began when she split up with her first husband, married his friend a couple of years later and moved to Dubai in the early 1990s. In 1992, they had a son they named Shiv.

Her husband started work with an insurance company, Eagle Star, while Pushkar worked as an accounts executive with the marketing and advertising agency Bozell Prime, the Indian magazine Outlook reported in 2010. Both were mid-level jobs.

The couple, however, wanted to make it big and moved into event management. But there were setbacks, Outlook reported, and her husband returned to India, where he died in 1997. It was allegedly a suicide.

There were debts to be paid, reportedly, and Pushkar and her son moved in with a girlfriend. She changed her name to Sue P. Menon, according to reports. (Her second husband’s name was Sujith Menon.)

Then, somehow, she and Shiv moved to Toronto with a banker of Pakistani origin who worked for Citibank at the time.

She moved to Toronto for a fresh start, said Puthenparambil.

“After her husband died, her son, who was then 5 or 6, went into shock and stopped talking,” he said. Pushkar, who was devoted to Shiv, was terrified.

“I met her (Sunanda) much later in life,” said Puthenparambil in an interview, “but it was obvious that time was very hard for her.”

Pushkar learned that she could get care in Canada for Shiv, who is now an actor living in Mumbai.

What she did while in Toronto is not very clear. In a 2010 interview with Tehelka, a weekly news magazine in New Delhi, she said she started life here from scratch.

“I’d literally gone there with a suitcase and my child,” she said in that interview, adding she did odds jobs for awhile.

Then Pushkar said she got into the IT sector, which had just begun to boom. “… we tied up with companies like Compaq and headhunted in India for them.”

Soon she started working with a San Francisco company called Valley Resources, she said, adding it was “a lot of fun and we did mighty well and made good money.” She said she enrolled her son in a private school.

At one point, she also worked for Noble House International, a global real estate company. No one answered the phone at the company’s North York office.

Then, in 2004, Pushkar said a company called Best Homes sent her to Dubai to set up its real estate operations. Real estate, she said, runs in her blood.

“So I came back to Dubai in August 2004 as general manager of Best Homes and worked on a big project with them,” she said then.

In December 2000, Pushkar bought a two-storey house for $325,000 in a quiet cul-de-sac in Markham, according to property records. The house is still in her name, although she never actually lived in it.

“There’s always been one family after another in that house,” said a neighbour, who did not give his name.

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The current occupants have lived there since March 2012.

It is not known where Pushkar lived in Toronto.

Rajesh Bhatia, a Mississauga realtor who was Facebook friends with Pushkar, said he never saw any mention of Toronto on her profile page. “There was nothing ever, it was mostly Dubai … that is it.”

When she returned to Dubai, with a prized Canadian passport, sources say she bought a number of apartments.

According to a declaration of assets in January 2013, she listed 12 apartments in Dubai: some rented out, some still under construction. The total value of her assets, including jewelry and cars, was approximately $21 million.

The declaration is available on the Indian prime minister’s website.

Pushkar first met Tharoor in 2009 in Dubai when he was still married to Christa Giles, a Canadian diplomat he had met at the UN.

Puthenparambil says he witnessed the Pushkar/Tharoor courtship and the two were “totally in love, there was no doubt.”

They were married in 2010.

Last week in a Twitter storm, Pushkar accused Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar of stalking her husband and having an affair with him. Pushkar tweeted from her husband’s account and even posted private exchanges ostensibly between Tharoor and Tarar.

The tweets soon vanished, and Tharoor said his account had been hacked. But Pushkar told two Indian newspapers that she had tweeted from her husband’s account and she stood by what she wrote.

Tharoor later issued a statement saying he and his wife were happily married. He blamed “unauthorized tweets” for the frenzy.

The next day Pushkar was found dead in a posh South Delhi hotel.

Police were quoted as saying that two strips of the antidepressant drug alprazolam, commonly known as Alprax or Xanax, were found in the hotel suite.

Her stomach was reportedly empty.

On Wednesday, Shiv Menon told Indian media that his mother died as a result of stress and the wrong medication — not suicide as some media had speculated.

“It was an unfortunate combination of media stress, tensions and a wrong mix of different medications,” Menon said in a statement released Wednesday, The Associated Press reported. He also said Tharoor would never have harmed his mother.

“They were very much in love, despite occasional differences, which they always overcame,” he said.

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