There are places we visit, and then there are places that quietly become a part of us. For me, Ghat No. 2 at Nishat was one such place.
It was sometime around the middle of May 2025 when, after years of restlessness, I stumbled upon a place that gave my troubled mind a strange kind of comfort. I did not know then that a simple ghat beside the waters would become my refuge, a place where I could sit with my thoughts, breathe without feeling suffocated, and, for a while, forget the weight I had been carrying.
To understand what that place meant to me, one has to go back to June 2023. It was an ordinary working day at the office. We were discussing the usual assignments and planning the next issue when the doorbell rang. A visitor from Baramulla entered my room along with my editor. He introduced a young man, barely 24, as his former classmate from college in Baramulla.
Nothing about that moment suggested that it would become the beginning of a long and painful chapter of my life. But sometimes life changes direction without warning. What followed was something I could never have imagined. An encounter that appeared insignificant that afternoon gradually began to cast a long shadow over our professional routine. For nearly two and a half years, the consequences of that day continued to haunt us in one way or another.
There were days when the newsroom felt heavier than usual. Work, which had always been my escape, sometimes became another source of anxiety. The mind has its own way of keeping accounts. It remembers things we desperately want to forget and replays moments we wish had never happened.
I kept going, as most people do. We all learn to carry certain burdens quietly. From the outside, life continues normally. Newspapers are published, deadlines are met, phones keep ringing and conversations go on. But somewhere inside, a person may be fighting a completely different battle.
Then came Ghat No. 2. I began going there sometime in May 2025. There was nothing extraordinary about the place. It was not a grand destination, nor did it promise any miracle. There was simply the lake, the mountains, the boats, the changing light and an inexplicable stillness.
And perhaps that was precisely what I needed. I would sit there and watch the water. Sometimes I would think. Sometimes I would think of nothing at all. The noise inside my head slowly began to fade. The waters of Nishat did not ask me questions. The mountains did not demand explanations. The boatmen went about their work, the breeze moved across the lake and the day quietly surrendered to evening.
For a man tired of explaining himself to the world, that silence was healing. Ghat No. 2 became more than a physical location. It became a pause between what had happened and what was yet to come. It reminded me that a wounded mind does not always need advice. Sometimes it simply needs a corner where it can breathe. Looking back, I realise that I had not discovered Ghat No. 2. Perhaps Ghat No. 2 had discovered me.
It came into my life when I was dangerously close to allowing bitterness to become a permanent resident of my mind. It taught me that even after a long period of darkness, there can still be a quiet corner waiting somewhere for us. I have often wondered why certain places acquire such emotional significance. Perhaps because places, unlike people, do not judge us. They simply allow us to be. For me, Nishat became that place.
Ghat No. 2 became my little sanctuary beside the lake, a place where I slowly learned to put down some of the weight I had been carrying since that June afternoon of 2023. The past has not disappeared. It never does. But its grip has weakened. And every time I return to Ghat No. 2, I am reminded of something I had almost forgotten: Life can hurt you deeply, but it can also quietly show you the way back to yourself. For me, that way back began beside the waters of Nishat.
