Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu

Daman sits an hour off the Mumbai–Ahmedabad highway, and the hour matters: it filters out everyone unwilling to slow down. The town splits across the Daman Ganga river into Nani Daman and Moti Daman, small and big, and the big one keeps the treasure. Moti Daman's fort is not a monument you visit; it is a neighbourhood you enter, its massive sixteenth-century walls enclosing a working district of government offices, gardens, a lighthouse and the Church of Bom Jesus, whose carved and gilded Portuguese-baroque interior would draw queues in Goa and here drew me, a caretaker, and one sparrow with strong opinions. I walked the ramparts in the late afternoon as fishing boats ran the river mouth below in single file, hulls painted in colours that suggested a friendly rivalry with the sunset. An old man feeding the fort's cats told me Daman's summary with civic satisfaction: 'Gujarat is that side. Bombay is that side. Here is here.'

Inland lies the territory's green fragment. Dadra and Nagar Haveli is mostly forest and river (the Daman Ganga winding through low Sahyadri foothills) and mostly Adivasi: Warli, Dhodia and Kokna communities whose white pictographs I had first met on Maharashtra's walls.