It was an early morning in May. My eldest daughter, who attends university in a mid-sized American city, had just come back for the summer. As soon as she emerged with a trolley full of dirty clothes and a head full of plans, I herded her to the car.

Home was still a drive away, all the way at the southern tip of my long and narrow city.

It was early enough that the Western Express Highway had not yet become an enormous parking lot. We drove past shops selling slabs of marble and buildings selling highway views. Then we soared above the brown-blue waters of the Arabian Sea, past the 424 cables of the Sea Link that brought us to the once-island of Worli.

This was a route that Aaliya had taken hundreds of times, as familiar as the songs on her walk-to-class playlist or the veins on her hand.

But then we did something unfamiliar. While she had been away, South Mumbai had acquired a new road—one that swooped over old shrines and juice centres, hugged the sea and then dipped into a long tunnel. So instead of driving past Haji Ali Juice Centre (where I have always planned to stop for a Sitafal Cream or a Kesar Royal Milkshake), Pedder Road (where traffic must have built up) and Pravin Bhai Darji (from whom I needed to pick up a couple of blouses), we turned onto the Coastal Road.

We flew along the controversial land that had risen from the sea—rushing past groves of samudraphals, vast construction sites lined with tetrapods, and old buildings seen from new angles. Then we ventured beneath the surface of things and, a few minutes later, we emerged onto Marine Drive. At this rate, I would get two washing machine loads done before lunchtime.

I turned to Aaliya with glee. “Can you imagine?” I asked. “We’re almost home.”

Aaliya, though, looked more disoriented than enamoured. “It’s so sad,” she exclaimed. “We didn’t pass school or Sama’s house or Chowpatty. It doesn’t feel I’ve come home at all. I miss the city.”

I don’t think I paid much attention to those words just then. I was in full Mummy Mode, eager to organise breakfast and start the tedious business of unpacking and sorting. It was only later that the remark began to niggle and forced me to think about the many cities that I too miss. Older Bombays and Mumbais lost amidst this rapidly changing jungle of concrete, cement, glass, flyovers, tunnels, chopped trees and overlooked landmarks.

It’s true that all cities grow and evolve. But, perhaps because it is pincered by the sea, Mumbai has had to evolve faster and more dramatically than many. The process started in the 1700s when a cluster of unpromising, amoeba-shaped islands started fusing—formally and informally—to form a single stretch of land. Marshes were filled, creeks were joined by causeways, and when the need for space arose, great swathes of land were reclaimed.

In the Colaba of the 1860s, for example, 43 acres of land were reclaimed between Apollo Bunder and Colaba Causeway, where eventually the Gateway of India, the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Yacht Club and rows of residential buildings were constructed. Without doubt, the Bombayites of those days must have looked on with awe and horror as the city changed shape and size before their eyes. Just as the Bombayites of the 1960s must have been stunned when mangroves and sunset points made way for the cement-and-brick grove of Cuffe Parade.

By the time I came along, Mumbai was a city of squat, blocky structures, sea breezes and the occasional clump of tall buildings. So rare and desired were those Cuffe Parade and Nariman Point addresses that all you had to say was, “He lives in Maker Towers” or “His office is in Mittal Chambers” to place the individual both geographically and socially. (How we fourth-floor Colaba kids yearned for the marble lobbies, zipping elevators and lofty perches of friends who lived on the 23rd floor of Persepolis or Cuffe Castle!)

The city for which my daughters feel nostalgic is very different from the city for which I feel nostalgia. The same drive from the airport reveals that a lot of the squat blocky structures have given way to tall, blocky structures. The faded five-storey buildings with floral curtains and names like Pitru Ashish are rapidly making way for gleaming giants with names like The Primordial House and Naman Xana. And as far as my daughters are concerned, an apartment on the 30th floor gives you zero clout—and even less of a view.

All of this makes sense. Because Mumbai cannot extend east or west or south, it is forced to sprint upwards and northwards. The Slum Rehabilitation Scheme and the much-contested transformation of mill lands into upmarket housing complexes have enabled the process. And although, as a journalist in the 1990s I have reported on each of these forces of change, I am still caught by surprise and find myself repeating, “When did these buildings come up? Where is that old chawl that used to be here?”

The official statistics support these observations. In India, a whopping 77 per cent of tall buildings (classified as over 150 meters high) are in Mumbai. Almost all of them have sprung up during the last 25 years and, in the last 16 years, 809 buildings in the city have been given permission to cross 40 floors.

Buildings, which are a mere 35 floors, no longer qualify as “tall” and are considered unremarkable and inevitable. And whenever I spot a new plot encircled by blue barricades, I know we will soon have another exclamation mark on our skyline.

Still, stretching upwards does not necessarily mean discarding the spirit and the Sosyo-vendors of the area. This is something I realised when I returned to Bohra Mohalla after almost a decade. In the time that I had stayed away, the ramshackle structures and little roads crowded with handcarts, quadruple-parked cars, shops dispensing firni and falooda, and hawkers selling an assortment of beads, coins and unidentifiable machine parts had been replaced by blocks of mammoth buildings. At first, I was thoroughly fazed—but I soon found that the things that made the area so eccentric and beloved were still around. They had merely been relocated to slightly swankier surroundings. And once I tracked down my old friends—Tawakkal Mithai and Haji Chicken, Taj Ice Cream and the purveyors of greasy bits and bobs—I felt comforted.

What is the moral of this story? That you don’t necessarily lose your city to blockification and towerification. But you do lose it if you refuse to venture into the unfamiliar to find the familiar. And if you obey Google Maps at the expense of all else.

For 10 years, I travelled along the busy road from Dadar to VT, which cuts through the heart of the city. There were days when I impatiently stared at my watch, but there were days when I hopped off the bus. Just to sample mithai from Joshi Buddhakaka because the name was irresistible. To buy polka-dotted fabric from Babubhai Jagjivandas because I had grown up on his “suiting, shirting, dress material, sadiya” jingle. To stock up on bottles of rose syrup from Iranian Sweets, a tempting shop which opened its doors only for a fortnight before Nowruz.

There were many other adventures I had planned to have. Stop for sabudana vada at Ladu Samrat; sample the buns at the once-famed Byculla Irani restaurants; investigate the floral fabrics that seemed to be the mainstay of a cavernous shop called Sukris Colombowalla.

Then, one day, the Mohammed Ali Road flyover got built, and the Lalbaug flyover got built and the Dadar flyover got built and I forsook wrought-iron balconies and buns. I chose expedience over exploration, and my daily journey ceased to be a catch-up and a conversation and became just another commute.

Somewhere along the way, Sukris Colombowalla shut down and, in a small way, I know I contributed to its demise.

After the Eastern Freeway came, I got a bird’s eye view onto a salty patch of the city that I had never known. After the Sea Link came, I stopped running into City Bakery to ogle the date and walnut cake and sublime toast. I stopped encountering the two rain trees that stand in the middle of Cadell Road—saved from the axe by Mumbai’s only successful Chipko effort.

Of course, I could always spurn the Sea Link in favour of old landmarks like the Mahim Dargah and the Mahim Church and Siddhivinayak Mandir. (And then grumble about the traffic caused by the Mahim Dargah festival and the Wednesday worshippers at the church and the Tuesday worshippers at the temple.)

I could certainly ignore the lure of the Coastal Road, and keep my long-intended date with Haji Ali Juice Centre. But I probably won’t because there is traffic to avoid and breakfast to organise. And as long as I know that their Kesar Custard Apple Cream lives on beneath the cement swoops of the Coastal Road, I feel reassured that I will be able to reconnect with my lost cities.

Shabnam Minwalla, is an author and journalist

(Views expressed are personal)

(This appeared in the print as 'Vertical Limit')