This paper presents an explicit construction of a class of optimal-access, minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes, for small values of the number $d$ of helper nodes. The construction is valid for any parameter set $(n,k,d)$ with $d \in \{k+1, k+2, k+3\}$ and employs a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ of size $q=O(n)$. We will refer to the constructed codes as Small-d MSR codes. The sub-packetization level $\alpha$ is given by $\alpha = s^{{\lceil\frac{n}{s}\rceil}}$, where $s=d-k+1$. By an earlier result on the sub-packetization level for optimal-access MSR codes, this is the smallest value possible.