With a blast of its horn, the SS Independence pulled out of the Bombay docks one rainy August afternoon in 1955. On its deck, 24-year-old Padma Desai stood gripping the handrail and gazing out at the land she was leaving behind: a newly independent India where she had been an ace student, consistently ranking at state-level exams and winning scholarships that helped her chart her own independent course from Surat, where she was born, to Bombay for graduate studies.

She thought, too, of the baggage she was leaving behind: a loveless marriage, forced on her by circumstance, and the knowledge that life in her young country held no promise for her, no future.