The Mumbai chapter of the Chabad Lubivitch movement resembles a war memorial, rebuilt except for the compound wall and the steps leading to the first-floor kitchen. Media groups worldwide lined up at the building to pay homage to little Moshe’s parents, Rabbi Holtzberg and Rivka, and seven others.

The anniversary event was handled by a management company. The lanes leading to Nariman House were blocked with a stage set up for the evening function.

Barring the fifth floor, which had the family’s room, visitors were allowed a tour. The fourth-floor guestroom still bore the marks: a wall full of bullet holes, floors dented by grenades. It was on this floor that the terrorists had been killed by Black Cats with a rocket launcher that pulverised a large portion of the wall.

On the first to third floors visitors saw guestrooms, a library and a kitchen, all with bullet and grenade marks, the window grills twisted, sacred text in Hebrew, and beds piled up on one another. The toilet window from where one of the guests escaped is still half-open, so is the steel refrigerator in the storeroom where nanny Sandra and cook Jackie had hidden with Moshe all night. The broken ground-floor lift has been replaced by a wooden ply.

The visitors included Rukhsana Kausar who killed a terrorist in her Jammu home, Union Minister Shashi Tharoor who said dealing with Pakistan over the 26/11 investigation has been frustrating, and leaders of various parties.

Chabad members from New York and Israel, too, paid homage. The elderly Rose Tzvenlla of Israel said, “I arrived in Mumbai this morning and thought I should come here. I knew them,” she says, pointing at lifesize portraits of the Holtberg couple in their wedding finery.