A quaint cottage on Chapel Road

As you walk through Bandra's Ranwar Village, one of the original pakhadis or hamlets that make up the suburb, it's easy to travel back to the era when its residents would cultivate rice and coconut in nearby fields or when women, wearing traditional lugras, would stand on wooden balconies of their cottages and indulge in a gossip session. Home to the East Indian community, the settlement, believed to date back to the early 1700s, retains quaint bungalows with red-tiled roofs, lining both sides of the narrow Veronica Street. It's a far cry from the glass and steel structures that dot Hill Road, a few metres away; in fact, if you stop to observe, you might just spot a resident in the traditional East Indian vermillion-hued drape.