Once upon a time…

We began where the river used to be a road.

The five of us—Maya the surveyor, Babua who remembered flood years like birthdays, Sunita with her knotty rope, my brother Kiran, and me—stood on the cracked bund and watched the heat shimmer over the levee. In the distance, the gaunt outline of the old peepul tree rose like a prayer hand. We were looking for the kuthla well, the one my grandmother said had a stone ring carved with fish scales. The map on Maya’s slate showed the old channels like faint veins beneath the dry crust. If we found the well, we could tap the sweetwater pocket the elders swore still ran there.

It was almost Raksha Bandhan, and every year now we tie threads around water points, not wrists. People laugh, but it’s become our thing—rakhis for the springs, for the old trees, a promise to protect what protects us. The kids call us the Rakhi Yatris. It started as a joke and then the dust never lifted, and jokes harden into rituals.

We followed the ghost river by signs no satellite can see: a thin strip of wild mint where goats refused to graze, a salt crust that crunched different underfoot. Maya would bend, touch, smell. Sunita would measure and knot another mark on the rope. Kiran kept walking ahead, scanning for the peepul’s shadow. Babua told us of the year the water stood as high as a man and swallowed a tractor without a burp, and how after, the monsoon learned to forget.

We found the well by stepping into it. Sunita’s foot went through the powdery surface and she curse-laughed, hauled herself back up, then slid down carefully into a ring of stone made gritty smooth by time. The carved fish still swam there, mouths open. Dry as bone.

We camped. At night, the wind carried grit into our teeth. Maya set out her little passive harvester, the one that folds like a kite. The desert tolerant grass we carried hummed in its grow tent like a cricket choir. At dawn, the peepul’s leaves rattled like coins. We lowered the rope. The bucket scraped. Nothing. Again. And then a sound like a sigh after a long day. Dark wet on stone.

It took all five of us to steady the pot when it came up full. The water smelled old, like cool caves, like mango pits chewed down to rag. We drank, then filled clay beads and buried them around the peepul’s roots. Kiran tied a red thread around the well’s lip. Babua kissed his thumb, touched the fish carving, and whispered a line from a folk song about river sisters.

When we left, the rope’s end trailed the air, damp and dripping. A band of ants followed the wet mark as if reading it. The peepul held every bead of water on its leaves, making a necklace to catch the morning light.