Washington - Hours after the shooting stopped, as the overwhelming stench of death still wafted over two luxury hotels and hospital wards soaked in blood and tears, the only sliver of comfort Mumbai residents had Saturday was a resilience born of surviving previous terrorist attacks.

"I don't know whether it's our memory or our resilience, but we just keep going. Glued to TV, watching the southern tip of Mumbai exploding, I thought about how everyone had forgotten the 1993 blasts that ripped this city apart," Kalpana Sharma, author of a book on Mumbai's Dharavi, Asia's largest slum of 1 million people, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Sharma was referring to the 13 serial bombs that shattered Mumbai on March 12, 1993, killing 200 people and wounding more than 1,000.

Each of Mumbai's 19 million inhabitants has a tempestuous relationship with the city in their daily struggle to survive. It's a metropolis of extremes where glass and concrete skyscrapers overlook sprawling slums and where the fabulously rich co-exist with the desperately poor.

It's a city that fails many of its residents who have no running water, sewage system, electricity or adequate housing but continues to attract millions from around the country. It's home to Bollywood, the prolific Hindi-language film industry whose gaudy, flashing lights collide with the shadows of Mumbai's untold homeless.

Mumbaikars, as the Indian financial capital's residents are called, are by now disturbingly familiar with ear-shattering explosions, the tangled crush of train carriages and human flesh, and hospitals unable to cope with the living as the dead pile up.

The image of a city able to bounce back after killer floods and terrorist attacks - the Bombay Stock Exchange targeted in 1993 opened for business the next day - is testament to the quiet heroism of its citizens. Yet, as Mumbai-based poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote cautioned: "Resilience is good, but amnesia is fatal."

"Mumbai's self-image as a courageous and resilient city ... deflects attention from the fact that this global metropolis is uniquely unprepared to defend itself against the depredations of terrorist warfare," he wrote after bombings in 2006, and it rings true even today.

Hoskote said Mumbaikars are in a state of denial, unable to acknowledge that their city is porous and fragile "and especially vulnerable to attack at a time when India has aligned itself with the United States in the 'war against terror.'"

Others are more optimistic. "Our trains, cars, buildings and markets - now hotels - have been bombed before," said Perena Motwane, an architect who assisted a wounded foreign tourist Wednesday. "It might happen again. Watch the international news, and you feel that hardly any city in the world is safe. But in Mumbai, I know I will always be helped. No one will let me bleed to death."

"On Thursday, people were back on the streets, going for their morning walk, travelling by train," she said. "Hundreds gathered outside the Taj and Oberoi [hotels] - some of it was typical Indian curiosity - but I really believe people also wanted to be at hand to help."

Chetan Mehta, a jeweller who survived the August 2003 bombings in the bustling Zaveri Bazar, said: "Mumbai died again this week. I don't know how much this city can take. I always think we won't survive the next time, and we do. After the bodies are cremated and buried, the politicians will come out, sham arrests will be made, the cases will fail in court, and life will go on."

"People are calling this attack India's 9/11," Sharma said. "It definitely is shocking, but that's overstating it. The real 9/11 was the Mumbai train blasts."

In July 2006, bombs exploded in rush-hour trains and stations, killing 187 people and wounding more than 700.

"Those blasts hit the soul of Mumbai as they impacted the middle class, for whom the train system is a lifeline," she said. Wealthy southern Mumbai, where this week's 59-hour siege unfolded, "is not the place where life is, for most of the city."

Among 10 areas targeted by gunmen were the posh Taj Mahal and Oberoi-Trident hotels, where international business deals are made, marriages are arranged in plush coffee shops and women shop at Gucci and Jimmy Choo boutiques.

But Mumbai belongs to all its residents. The underclasses claim the Taj and Trident as their own, or at least the more democratic spaces outside. The Taj overlooks Mumbai's main landmark, the Gateway of India, literally the archway into India at a time when most visitors arrived by ship. Middle-class families throng the area on holidays for boat rides that cost a mere 10 rupees.

Along the waterfront across from the Trident, children ride on rickety ferris wheels, vendors sell spicy Chinese noodles and couples linger on ledges near the sea in rare unchaperoned moments.

"People have died, both rich and poor," Motwane said. "Why is there so much media attention on the foreign tourists and the hotels? Don't ordinary people matter anymore? We are all mourning, and the only question we must ask is how a few dozen men could hold an entire city to ransom."