For the last 42 years I have wondered, if only now and then, who Padma Desai is or was. That she is an economist of some repute, I knew, of course. After all, we had to read her book — written along with Jagdish Bhagwati — for the course in Indian economics. But when I was admitted to the Delhi School of Economics in 1970, she had been gone for around a year. Whenever her name came up, there was always a strange undertone — as also a tinge of regret that she had left.