For such a big city, Ahmedabad is resolutely behind times. Poor Gandhinagar , the neatly laid out state capital just 30 km away, is both out of sight and out of mind. Besides, Ahmedabad truly could not be bothered with the lines that divide `rural' and `urban' India. The city relishes contrasts and does so without any fuss. You'll find women with a regal bearing pulling carts on the thoroughfares. Camels undulate on city streets, pulling carts placidly as young women whiz by on nifty new two-wheelers. A time traveller from the 16th century would still find descendants of old merchant families living in their original pols , those protected community houses and cloistered streets that are a unique feature of the ancient walled city. He could slip through secret passages that connect one pol to another and avoid most of the modern roads that connect them!

Till the late nineties, Ahmedabad did not even have traffic signals. The police would pull up posh cars to explain what a green light meant and they didn't issue penalty challans for a few days! Now, as if to make up for the lost time, when the gutsy Amdavadis sight a traffic light, they rev up energetically, sometimes collide but they don't argue. They drive on , time is money. And money is discussed all the time. In street corners and over dinner tables, bets are placed on everything from blue-chip stocks to cricket matches. No wonder, it is also the birthplace of futures trading , in the 18th century, buffeted between the warring Marathas and Mughals, enterprising citizens invented a nominal currency, ant, purely to speculate. Prohibition only made the liquor trade go underground, sometimes literally, as spurious alcohol found its way into tanks dug under the then dry bed of the Sabarmati River. Now, a canal brings water from the controversial Narmada project to this hot and dusty city that Jahangir labelled Gardabad on his only visit here.

You will find the greatest variety in food here , even as you find yourself favouring familiar and addictive goodies like khandvi and aamras. Gujarati cuisine, like the intrepid peoples of this state, veers towards the sweet but never quite loses its essential diversity. Virtually the whole city queues up at restaurants every weekend. And Mahatma Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram even now defines tranquility in a city that made headlines for the terrible communal pogrom of 2002 , the precinct of the Shah Alam Rauza, an important Islamic monument here, is now a refugee camp.

The Sarabhais are the city's first family and have endowed Ahmedabad with some of its finest educational and cultural institutions. Celebrated dancer Mrinalini has travelled all over the world and always returned to the city she calls home ever since she arrived here as the legendary physicist Vikram Sarabhai's young bride. ,To me, Ahmedabad is one of the most fascinating cities, an architectural treasure house. It is very much in the present. Yet, when I wander the streets, I walk through history, listening to the echoes of the past,' she says.