Ten months ago when sectarian violence wracked this city and mobs killed hundreds, Hindus and Muslims in one poor neighborhood helped save one another from the flames.
Now they say will unite again -- this time at the ballot box on Thursday in a vote that will test India's religious tolerance.
In the February violence, a gang of Hindus from outside the community burned and beat to death about 100 people of both faiths in the Naroda Patiya slum. Most of the more than 1,000 who lived there escaped.
They returned after the bloodshed, rebuilt their community and now face elections in Gujarat state.
``Everybody ran away together. We'll vote together,'' said Jayeda Banu, 35, a Muslim whose family lives next door to that of Kamlaben Jethabhai, 60, a Hindu.
``There's no difference here between Muslims and Hindus. Whatever happens we are all living together,'' Jethabhai said.
Like many others in this impoverished quarter, both live in new concrete homes built by the Islamic Relief Committee -- a charity that chose to ignore religious differences in its post-riot reconstruction work.
Hindu nationalists whose rhetoric helped fuel religious riots for three months this year are trying retain power when voters elect a new legislature for the western state of Gujarat.
Hindus constitute more than 80 percent of India's billion people, Muslims 13 percent and Christians 2 percent. Muslims are just under 12 percent of Gujarat's 32.8 million voters, and could help bring a change in the state government if enough Hindus vote with them.
In the final day of campaigning on Tuesday, polls show a tight race for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, against the opposition Congress party, which espouses a secular India.
The BJP is the party of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose government faces a national poll by 2004. A loss in Gujarat could shake Vajpayee's 19-party coalition government and bring early Parliament elections.
The two parties held street parades on Tuesday. Party flags flew on motorcycle convoys, drums were pounded on the backs of trucks and loudspeakers wailed from motorized rickshaws.
The leaders of the two main contenders -- the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition Congress party that backs secularism-- tried to woo voters at rival rallies. Their supporters went house to house to encourage people to vote.
Many of those who fled for their lives down the narrow, rubble- and paper-strewn alleyways of Naroda Patiya on Feb. 28 said they planned to vote for the Congress party.
Some residents said it doesn't matter who wins, because politicians never help them.
``We have faith in people around us, living here,'' said Banu, a Muslim woman, whose father-in-law was burned to death.
A Hindu neighbor, Lala Babu Singh, 54, said the Islamic Relief Committee not only built him a new house, but replaced his handcart, burned by the mob of his fellow Hindus.
With a saffron scarf wrapping her long gray hair, and red plastic bangles dancing up and down her arms, Jethabhai, the Hindu matron, stood in her doorway, surrounded by young Muslim women, praising and teasing her.
``She's our neighbor since childhood,'' said Banu, 35, whose own Muslim children now scamper at Jethabhai's stoop. ``She'll live with us. She'll die with us.''