Every time I return to Ghat No. 2, I am reminded of something I had almost forgotten. Last Sunday, I wrote about the place that came into my life at a time when my mind had become tired of carrying the burden of things that had happened over the preceding years. I wrote about how the quiet waters of Nishat slowly became a refuge, a place where I could sit without having to explain myself to anyone. But there was another little story behind my daily visits to Ghat No. 2. Once I had discovered this place as a safer hideout for my troubled mind, I needed a reason to keep coming back without making my visits look unusual. I did not want questions. I wanted solitude. And then I found the fishing rod.
It may sound rather ordinary, even amusing, that a fishing rod could become an excuse for someone to spend hours at a particular ghat. But for me, it became much more than that. It took me back to my childhood. I was born in Nowpora’s Daulatabad Mohalla. Behind our house, in those days, there was a small offshoot of the Dal Lake. That waterway does not exist anymore. It has disappeared somewhere between the passage of time and the changing face of Srinagar. But in my memory, it is still there. I can still see the water. I can still feel the innocence of those days.
As children, we never imagined that the things around us would one day disappear. We took the water for granted. We believed the little stream behind our house would always flow, the lanes would always look the same, and the familiar world of our childhood would remain exactly where we had left it. Children are blessed with that innocence. They believe everything they love is permanent. It is only when we grow older that we discover how temporary everything really is. Perhaps that is why, when I first held the fishing rod at Ghat No. 2, something stirred deep inside me. It was not really about catching fish. It was about catching a piece of my childhood.
The fishing rod gave me a perfectly natural reason to sit beside the lake for hours. I could watch the water, follow the ripples, look at the float and simply wait. And there is something strangely healing about waiting. When the mind is troubled, it wants answers immediately. Why did this happen? How did it happen? What happens next? But fishing teaches you the opposite. It teaches you to wait without knowing whether anything will happen at all. You throw the line into the water.
Then you wait. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes the float moves. And sometimes you pull the line back only to discover that there was nothing there. Yet you return the next day. Perhaps life is much the same. We keep throwing our hopes into the waters of time, waiting for something to return. Some things do. Some never do. And for some things, we eventually stop waiting altogether. Sitting at Ghat No. 2 with a fishing rod in my hands slowly became a routine.
To anyone passing by, I was simply a man enjoying an old childhood pastime. But only I knew what those long hours meant. The fishing rod gave me an excuse. The lake gave me solitude. And that solitude gave my tired mind a little space to breathe. There were days when I would sit for hours without catching a single fish. Strangely, I never felt that those hours had been wasted. I had gone there to catch fish. But more often than not, I returned with something else, peace. And there was an irony in all of this.
The little waterway behind our childhood home in Daulatabad had disappeared. Yet, decades later, a simple fishing rod beside another part of the same great lake somehow brought that lost childhood back to me. Perhaps that is what memory does. It preserves what time destroys. A waterway may disappear. A house may change. People may move away. Childhood may become nothing more than a faded photograph. But a smell, a sound, a familiar view of water—or even something as simple as a fishing rod, can suddenly open a forgotten door inside us. And behind that door, childhood is still waiting. For me, Ghat No. 2 became that door. I began going there for peace. Then I stayed for the memories. And slowly, those memories themselves became a form of healing. The fishing rod was only an excuse. The real purpose was to sit beside the water and search for a part of myself that I thought I had lost somewhere along the way.
Perhaps that is why, even today, every visit to Ghat No. 2 feels less like going somewhere and more like returning. Returning to the water. Returning to silence. Returning to childhood. And perhaps, more than anything else, returning to myself.
