Ayahs provided care labor to British families on the transoceanic voyages between India and Britain. In British cultural representations, mobility endowed ayahs with wealth and agency. This chapter, by contrast, argues that the lives of peripatetic ayahs were quite precarious; they had no legal protection from abuse and abandonment. While the East India Company had instituted a bond system for the repatriation of ayahs to India, the British state from 1858 formulated the domestic labor of ayahs as a “private” issue beyond state intervention, thereby upholding the privileges of British employers and providing no solution for the abandonment of ayahs in Britain. An Ayahs’ Home was set up in London, providing boarding for ayahs and allowing London missionaries the opportunity to proselytize the captive group of “heathen” women. Using petitions by ayahs, vernacular sources, newspapers, and documents from the Ayahs’ Home and the India Office in London, this chapter highlights the experiences of traveling ayahs from ship voyages to London courtrooms, their gendered attempts to preserve their caste purity – deemed lost for crossing the ocean – and their desperate attempts to return home to India.