Of course I went to Leopold's.

I was in Bombay for just three days. After the mandatory hours of family get-togethers and upset stomachs, there was no time for Vada Pav or chowpatty or even chappals on Linking Road.

But I couldn't leave without seeing Leo once again, nor without a glimpse of the Taj.

Colaba had been my home for a special year - my first year as a working woman living alone in a big city. My office was a five-minute walk from Gateway. Searching for paying guest accommodation, it took me no more than a first glance to decide the area would be home too. Yah, the low tide stank badly and my male colleagues felt protective when I left office late in the red light district.... but I had rarely felt so comfortabe in my skin as there. What else can you feel in a place so alive? Here, the lights were always on. Days brought in a stream of shoppers and tourists. Nights throbbed with youngsters partying. And the food... that in itself was worth a migration.

So when the mayhem began, as I saw the events unfold from another country, I stopped in my tracks. It was surreal, seeing the gun shots, the raging fires, the mass murders playing out over an area whose every road I knew. I felt sure the stains wouldn't go away, couldn't go away, that the episode would change the picture of the Colaba I knew.

I have always avoided revisiting places from my past - there's something disquieting about finding out that the see-saw and swings park from my childhood is now a parking lot, that the school field has turned into an academic block... I prefer staying away, with a hazy but original picture intact in my head, than seeing the changes and getting a cover version lodged in my memory instead.

But this was different. I felt compelled to go, to be a part of what had happened, even if two weeks too late.

And so I went.

My visit turned out to be quite surreal, but not for the reasons I had expected. Thing was, nothing much has changed. The stalls that line the road outside Leo are still choc-a-bloc, as are the tables behind the open-door ground floor of the restaurant. There's the same steady hum of traffic in the background and the same loud hustling and bargaining on the sidewalk.

I drive through the alleyways that gradate this bustling scene into the decorum of the Taj. Saloons and shops that you go to only if you know where you're going. Quiet as always. And open for business still.

A few more turns, and only then I see the first sign, the only sign I see, of the terror attack: Peeking out above the heritage buildings is the corner spire of the Taj, still blackened at the edges by the fire that is now symbol of the terror attacks. A baricade stops me from taking the road by the sea and searching for changes, but by now I know, Colaba is determined to erase reminders of those three days of November.

I suppose the tingling in my stomach was the fight between a relief that things are the same and an awareness that it could so easily have been different. Never before had I walked the place thinking how fragile it was.

But no, Colaba is not fragile.

Ironic, isn't it? Those gun-toting agents of terror tried to change the map of Mumbai, but succeeded only in firmly entrenching Mumbai to what it has always been. If there's one place where old buildings won't come down, where old favourite restaurants won't shut down to relocate, where street stalls won't be asked to vacate public space - it's here.