आभानेरी की बावड़ी

कथा 2

The Fisherman of Naini Lake

Naini Lake sits in the hill town of Nainital, Uttarakhand — a kidney-shaped body of water surrounded by seven hills, its surface reflecting the Mall Road lights at night and the Himalayas at dawn. The lake is deep — deeper than the tourist boats suggest, with a center that drops to twenty-seven meters and a bottom that has never been fully mapped. The locals call it Naini Devi's eye. The fishermen who work its edges at dawn have another name for its center: 'the quiet place,' because fish do not swim there.

Harish was sixty-three years old and had fished Naini Lake since he was twelve. He used a small wooden boat — not the painted tourist boats but a plain, unpainted dinghy that his father had built in 1971. He fished at dawn, sold his catch to the hotels by eight, and was home before the tourist crowds arrived. He knew the lake the way a reader knows a favourite book: every current, every depth change, every rock and weed bed.

In November 2016, Harish went out at 4:30 AM — earlier than usual, because the season was changing and the fish were moving to deeper water to escape the cooling surface. The lake was perfectly still. No wind. No ripple. The surface was a black mirror reflecting nothing because there were no stars — cloud cover had settled into the valley overnight.

Harish rowed to his usual spot — about two hundred meters from shore, where the bottom dropped from eight meters to fifteen. He set his line. He waited. The silence was total. Not peaceful silence — the kind of silence that feels like a room with the door closed. He noticed that the surface around his boat was unnaturally flat. Water has micro-movements — tiny oscillations from wind, from fish, from the earth's own vibration. This water had none. It was as still as glass in a frame.

Then he heard it. Not singing, exactly — Harish was specific about this when he told the story later. It was more like a hum. A vibration that came from below the water rather than across it. It entered his body through the boat's hull — through his feet and his spine rather than his ears. It was not unpleasant. It was warm. It felt like being very slightly drunk on something sweet.

Harish looked down into the water beside his boat. He could not see the bottom — it was too dark and too deep. But he could see light. Not reflected light from above. Light from below. A soft, golden-green luminescence rising from the depths. It pulsed with the same rhythm as the humming in his spine.

His hand was over the side of the boat. He did not remember putting it there. His fingers were touching the water's surface. The water was warm — bath-warm, impossibly warm for November in Nainital when the lake surface should have been twelve degrees Celsius at most. His arm went in to the elbow. The warmth moved up his skin like a hand drawing him forward.

Harish pulled his arm out. He said later that this was the hardest thing he had ever done — harder than any physical labour, harder than grief, harder than fear. His body wanted to go into the water the way a tired body wants sleep. The desire was not sexual, not romantic. It was gravitational. The water was where he was supposed to be. He knew this with his whole body.

He rowed back to shore in the dark, pulling against a current that should not have existed in a lake with no river inflow at that hour. He beached the boat and sat on the shore until the sun rose. He did not fish that day. He did not fish for a week.

When he returned, he never again went out before first light. He never fished past the drop-off line. And on still mornings, when the surface of Naini Lake was too perfect, too flat, too much like a mirror with something behind it — he stayed on shore and told the younger fishermen: 'Not today. She is awake today. Go tomorrow.'

कथा 3

The Bride at Pushkar Lake

Pushkar Lake in Rajasthan is sacred — one of the few places in India with a dedicated Brahma temple, its ghats lined with white-washed temples and pilgrim hostels, its water believed to have been created by the god Brahma dropping a lotus. Millions bathe in it during the Kartik Purnima fair. The water is shallow, murky with devotion — marigold petals, coconut fragments, ash from funeral pyres on its western bank.

But Pushkar has an older reputation among the families who have lived there for generations. The lake is generous in the shallows. It gives blessing, it accepts offering, it heals. But there is a place — not the center exactly, but a point between the Varah Ghat and the Jaipur Ghat where the lake bed drops unexpectedly — where the water behaves differently. Boats avoid it. Swimmers are told never to cross it. The reason given to tourists is 'currents.' The reason given to children is 'Jal Pari.'

In 1994, a wedding procession approached Pushkar Lake for the traditional bridal blessing. The bride — Kavita, nineteen years old, from a merchant family in Ajmer — was to receive water from the lake poured over her hands by the priest. This is standard. This is done thousands of times each wedding season.

The family had chosen a ghat on the eastern side — less crowded, better for photographs. The ghat extended into the lake on a stone platform. Kavita, dressed in her red wedding lehnga with her face veiled, sat at the platform's edge while the priest filled a copper vessel with lake water.

What happened next was witnessed by over forty people. Kavita stood up — smoothly, without haste — and walked into the lake. Not stumbling. Not falling. Walking, the way you walk into a room you have been invited into. The water reached her ankles, her knees, her waist. Her family was frozen for approximately eight seconds — the time it takes for the brain to process something impossible. Then everyone moved at once.

Her brother reached her first. He grabbed her arm. He said later that pulling her back was like pulling against a river current — not a lateral force but a downward one, as if her body weighed three times what it should. Two more men entered the water. Together, they dragged her back to the ghat.

Kavita was conscious. Her eyes were open. But she was looking at something in the water — something behind the men, behind the splashing, in the deeper water beyond the ghat. Her lips were moving. Her mother, who was closest to her face, said Kavita was whispering: 'So beautiful. It's so beautiful there.'

The wedding continued after a two-hour delay. Kavita said she remembered nothing — only a feeling of warmth and a sound like singing that came from the lake bed. She has never returned to Pushkar. She lives in Ajmer, eight kilometers away, and has not visited the lake in thirty years. Her family does not discuss it. The ghat they used that day is still operational. No one in the family uses it.

कथा 4

The Night Swimmers of Bhimtal

Bhimtal Lake in the Kumaon hills of Uttarakhand is smaller than Nainital and quieter — a green, deep body of water with an island in its center and forests pressing close to its shores. In the 1990s and 2000s, before the area became heavily developed, local teenagers used the lake for night swimming — an illegal, unsupervised tradition that every generation participated in and every parent forbade.

Deepak Bisht was seventeen in 2001 and swam in Bhimtal with his friends on warm June nights — three or four of them, slipping away after their families slept, cycling to the lake's eastern shore where the trees grew to the water's edge and no road-light reached. They swam in underwear, racing to the island and back, proving nothing to no one except themselves.

On a night in mid-June — clear sky, three-quarter moon, no wind — Deepak and two friends entered the water at their usual spot. The swim to the island was four hundred meters. They had done it dozens of times. The water was warm on the surface, cold below the knees — normal thermocline behavior for a mountain lake in early summer.

Deepak was the strongest swimmer. He was fifty meters ahead of his friends when he stopped. Not from exhaustion — he simply stopped moving forward, treading water in the lake's middle depth. He was looking down. His friends, approaching from behind, called to him. He did not respond.

His friend Rajat reached him and grabbed his shoulder. Deepak's body was rigid. His legs were still kicking — maintaining his position in the water — but his arms were at his sides and his face was tilted downward, into the water. His eyes were open. He was looking at something below the surface.

Rajat pulled Deepak's face up. Deepak blinked. He looked at Rajat with an expression Rajat later described as 'confused, like I had woken him up.' Then Deepak said: 'There's a woman down there. She's looking up at us.'

The three boys swam back to shore faster than they had ever swum anything. They sat on the bank, shaking, not from cold. Deepak kept looking at the water. He said the woman was pale — 'white, not Indian-white, actually white, like marble' — and her hair was spread around her head in the water like a dark circle. She was deep — ten meters or more below the surface. And she was looking up. Directly at them. Directly at him.

Deepak never swam in Bhimtal again. Neither did his friends. The night-swimming tradition at that particular shore ended with that generation — younger teenagers found a different spot on the lake's western side, shallower, closer to houses. No one told them to move. They just did. As if the eastern shore's reputation had seeped into the local knowledge without anyone speaking it aloud.

Deepak is forty-one now. He lives in Haldwani, in the plains below the hills. He does not visit Bhimtal. He told a journalist in 2022: 'I don't think she wanted to hurt us. I think she was just... there. And she wanted us to see her. She wanted someone to know she was there. That's what scared me the most — not that she was dangerous, but that she was lonely.'