The morning the lake disappeared

It started with a three-year-old.

My daughter had just turned three, and like most parents drunk on the magic of watching a small human discover the world, I had bought a camera. A proper one. The kind with lenses you swap out and settings you don't fully understand yet. The plan was to photograph her, capture every ridiculous, wonderful, fleeting moment before it slipped away.

Cameras have a way of opening doors you didn't know existed. This one opened into nature photography in India.

I'd always loved the outdoors. Weekends on trails, boots muddy, lungs full of something cleaner than city air. And somewhere between the bedtime routines and the toddler chaos, I'd started noticing photographs. Not the ones on walls or in magazines. The ones shared by people who had clearly woken up at an ungodly hour and dragged themselves somewhere cold and quiet. Golden light spilling across water. Mist curling over valleys. The quiet before the birds start, when the air is cold and the sky hasn't decided what colour it is yet. I wanted to see that for myself.

I settled on Hesaraghatta. About an hour from Bangalore, where the roads thin out and the air starts to smell different. There was a reservoir there, a large one, and I had visions of standing at the water's edge as the sun cracked the horizon, fog drifting across the surface.

I set my alarm for a time that felt almost offensive.

We drove out in the dark, the city thinning around us, streetlights giving way to a darkness that deepens the further you go from Bangalore. I had my camera. I had a 10-stop ND filter I'd been wanting to try, the kind that turns seconds into minutes, smoothing water into something dreamlike. November. The air had that nip to it, enough that your nose knows it first. It smelled earthy and slightly electric, the way it does only in the early hours when the city hasn't woken up yet.

We parked. We walked. Feet finding the path more than eyes.

We walked to where the lake was supposed to be.

There was no lake.

In front of us stretched a vast open expanse, flat and pale in the early darkness, extending further than I could see. No water. No reflections. Just land. Cracked and dry, scattered with stones, short stubby bushes, grass that barely reached your ankles.

An early morning walker appeared out of the gloom, the kind of local who moves through the landscape like he owns it, which in every way that matters, he does.

"Where's the lake?" I asked.

He looked at us. Then at the emptiness. Then back at us.

"This," he said, with the patience of someone explaining the obvious, "is the lake."

It had dried up completely. What had been a reservoir was now an accidental grassland, a ghost of water wearing the clothes of a field. And rising from the cracked lakebed, a handful of trees. Trees that had grown in the water, now standing in air, roots in dust, branches reaching into the mist that was, despite everything, beginning to arrive.

The fog came anyway.

I set up the camera. I attached the filter. And I waited.

What happened next is the part I struggle to explain, which is perhaps why I reached for a camera instead. The light began. Not all at once. It seeped in from the east, first the faintest grey, then a slow bloom of purple above the treeline. The mist moved through the trees slowly, the way something moves when it knows it has your attention. It hid things. Then revealed them. The trees appeared and disappeared. The background dissolved into suggestion.

I engaged the shutter for a long slow count. It must have been over a minute.

The resulting photograph is called Purple Haze.

It's minimal. Quiet. A little mysterious. The fog does something I still can't fully explain, it softens the world to the point where you're not entirely sure what you're looking at, and that uncertainty becomes the whole point.

What's out there? What's hiding in the mist?

I drove home as the city was waking up, coffee cold, shoes damp. I sat with the image on my screen for a while before I did anything else with it. I've been back to Hesaraghatta twice since. The water was there both times.

A print of Purple Haze is available in the shop.