December 11, 2011

I'm Daman


Only a few hours north of Bombay are the union territories of Daman and Dadra & Nagar Haveli. They are accessible via Gujarat, where the nearest rail head of Vapi is situated. I grabbed a rickshaw to Daman. The driver asked me which Daman I wanted to go to. I looked at him blankly and told him to take me to the one that had hotels. It turned out the main town is called Moti Daman (Fat Daman) while the secluded beach side resort community is called Nani Daman (Small Daman). I found a hotel fitting my meager budget in Nani Daman, ate lunch by the rocky beach, and negotiated a tour of the surroundings with a rickshaw driver.


We ventured to the two Portuguese forts in the region, one in Moti Daman and one across the Damanganga River in Nani Daman. I climbed to the top of a lighthouse to admire the view, the rickety spiral staircase shaking as violently as the disturbed man who had sat beside me on the train. The four hundred year old Church of Bom Jesus was my next stop, before capping of the day at Jampore Beach. Gujarat is a dry state, so its borders are demarcated by a string of boozeries rather than barbed wire fencing. I imbibed at one of Jampore's many beachfront watering holes with my driver. The next morning, I found myself having breakfast at his home.


After sobering up, the driver had taken me home to meet his wife. The rest of his family would be visiting the next day, so he invited me over for breakfast then. Despite being in his early forties, he was already a grandfather. They fed me chapatis, eggs, and sauce. Post breakfast, I said goodbye to Daman and headed to Silvassa, the capital of Dadra & Nagar Haveli. While Daman is to the east of Vapi, Silvassa is to the west. I walked around the sleepy town for several hours, checking out the tribal museum and local gardens before catching a shared rickshaw back to Vapi. My bus back to Bombay was scheduled to leave after midnight, so I asked to be dropped at a local movie theater where I could pass the time.


Vapi is the fourth most polluted city in the world. The rest of the cities on the list pretty much map to the ones I visited in China. It was fitting that in this dirty city I would watch a movie called Dirty Picture. The film was about a voluptuous siren's rapid rise to fame in the Indian movie industry, and subsequent fall from grace. There were no females in the audience. Every time the lead actress displayed an ounce of flesh, the local men started baying like a pack of hyenas, cheering, whistling, and yelling obscenities that would have offended my delicate sensibilities had I been able to understand them.


*****

"Bootiful?" - Rickshaw driver, after examining the photo he had clicked of me on my camera