IT WAS hardly an hour since an unseen Indian army commando had dumped the limp body of the last extremist out of the ground floor window of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.
In the vicinity of the massive building - India's most famous hotel - a heavy pall of putrid smoke still hung in the air as firefighters worked to douse the fires that were sparked by the last fierce gun battle inside. Some of the exquisite turrets and towers of the landmark building - the most potent symbol of Mumbai's status as India's financial capital and most cosmopolitan city - had been charred and disfigured by the onslaught and siege of the previous 62 hours.
But at 9am on Saturday morning, if you moved a block or two away from the hotel's seafront location in the touristy Colaba area of the city, visually it was as if nothing had happened over the previous two days. Sure, a straggle of onlookers stood at the cordons watching the mop-up operation. But at popular tourist restaurant Leopolds, the only sign of the slaughter that claimed eight lives only three nights previously was a sad piece of string cordoning off the entrance. It was closed. There were no police nor any security outside. Passersby ambled up to try and peer through the cracks in the boarded-up windows.
Superficially, it was almost as if the atrocity was being absorbed and swallowed up by this vast city of 16 million people. Such absorption, a kind of psychological denial of atrocities, has been a recurrent phenomenon in recent Indian history. The Mumbai attack, which has claimed 172 lives so far, is the worst atrocity, but only just, in India this year. Astoundingly, some 2,300 lives had been claimed in various attacks in Kashmir, Assam, Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedebad in 2008, most carried out by Islamic extremists and separatists. And Mumbai (formerly Bombay) has not been immune from terrorist attacks. The bombing of commuter trains in July 2006 claimed 190 lives and there have been a series of terrorist attacks stretching back to 1993. A constant refrain from commentators was that no lessons had been learned from previous attacks.
"Horror is part of life," an elderly American resident of the city told me when trying to explain the psyche of a city where wealth and poverty coexist cheek by jowl.
"People in Bombay are born into a situation where people are dying and dead on the street and people step over them. Your defences are against anything that is negative. You cannot believe how people turn off bad news."
That may well be so. But the quiescence on Saturday morning was deceptive. This time the sense of horror seemed of an altogether different dimension.
What marked this out as particularly egregious stemmed from the sophistication of the planning and the deliberate rationale behind the choice of multiple targets; the two most famous hotels; the beacon for western tourists, Leopolds; and an obscure Jewish centre (the only one in the entire city).
The inevitable public outrage finally erupted yesterday with huge street protests and the enforced resignation of the Indian home minister and national security adviser.
And even before that, there was an extraordinary volume of vitriol and anger being directed at politicians of all hues, from prime minister Manmohan Singh to local politicians in Mumbai. Newspapers condemned the anaemic responses, text messages lampooned them, commentators on television lashed out openly at the "corruption" and ineptitude of the political classes.
The outspokenness of actor Arjun Rampal, Bollywood's version of George Clooney, was typical. Speaking during a debate on a local TV station, he said: "The people who should be hiding their faces today are our politicians. We have shown the world how vulnerable and susceptible we are to terrorism.
"We have done nothing about it since 1993 [the first major terrorist attack on Mumbai] until now," he said.
That theme - that India's political class has learned nothing from the many previous terrorist attacks - recurred many times this week. Mumbai intellectual Gerson da Cunha, speaking on the same programme, referred to the tactic used by the terrorists holed up in the Taj hotel of switching off the lights.
"In the Taj in the ballroom, when they were fighting in the dark, for me it symbolised the whole situation," he said.
"We have to face the fact that in this area we are amateur and inept and have done a thoroughly bad job."
In the 60 hours of the siege, it seemed as if normal life was suspended in the city. Mumbaikars spoke of little else, were glued to the rolling news coverage on over half a dozen channels. What was evident was the huge sympathy for those in the frontline and the victims. Posters were put up in virtually every shop in the suburb of Bandra saying: "We salute Mumbai police. We mourn the loss of Mumbaikars."
Services and vigils were held across the city. Volunteer support centres were set up. The media described what happened as "India's 9-11". For once, they were not overstating it.