There was a time when going somewhere did not necessarily mean doing something.

No restaurant reservation.
No itinerary.
No “top five things to see.”
No carefully chosen outfit because apparently even sitting beside a river now requires one.
And certainly no Google review waiting to be written afterwards.

There was just a kacchi road somewhere near Mayur Vihar Phase I, a car, a few friends, and the Yamuna.

We called it Nadi Ka Kinaara.

I don’t remember who came up with the name. Someone in our college friends’ group, probably. It was not particularly inventive, but then again, we weren’t trying to launch a tourism brand. We just needed to know what to call the place when someone said, “Chal, nadi ke kinaare chalte hain.”

And we went.

This was sometime between 2010 and 2013.

The road to nowhere

The road was raw.

Not charmingly rustic in the way travel websites describe rustic places. It was just… raw.

A kacchi road leading away from the city, somewhere around the Noida Toll Road entrance, taking us towards the Yamuna floodplain.

There wasn’t much around.

Fields. Trees. Tall grass. Water. Birds. Open sky.

And the slightly disconcerting feeling that if your car broke down, you might have to rethink your life choices.

At the time, that was part of the attraction.

Delhi was right there, but somehow it felt far away.

The Yamuna floodplain around this part of Delhi was, and remains, a very different landscape from the city built around it. Government mapping places the Mayur Vihar area directly alongside the Yamuna, while the river’s floodplain has historically included extensive alluvial and agricultural stretches. (Irrigation and Flood Control Department)

We didn’t know any of that.

We were not students of urban ecology.

We were students who had discovered a place where nobody was asking us what we were doing.

We did absolutely nothing

This is perhaps the most difficult thing to explain about Nadi Ka Kinaara.

We went there to do nothing.

And we were very good at it.

We would sit near the river.

Sometimes we’d talk.

Mostly we’d laugh.

Sometimes we probably talked about things that seemed extremely important at the time and that I have absolutely no recollection of today.

There was no picnic.

No thermos of chai.

No speaker playing music.

No carefully packed sandwiches.

No yoga.

No meditation.

No connecting with nature.

We simply sat there.

And for a little while, we were completely present.

The river wasn’t particularly beautiful in the conventional sense. At times, the water was foamy. It was the Yamuna, after all. This was Delhi, not some Himalayan postcard.

But there was something about sitting beside that enormous stretch of water with fields and trees around us that made the city disappear.

Or at least become someone else’s problem for an hour.

The small matter of personal safety

There was, however, one minor complication.

We were young women going to an isolated stretch of the river.

And we weren’t stupid.

We knew that if someone decided to attack us there, there was nobody around to suddenly appear and say, “Excuse me, could you please stop being threatening?”

So we usually went with our male friends, in their cars.

And we had a very simple safety protocol.

If another car arrived and there were men inside and something about the situation didn’t feel right, we left.

No investigation.

No let’s see what happens.

No heroic behaviour.

Just:

“Okay. Time to go.”

It is funny now.

But it wasn’t really funny then.

And perhaps that is one of the strange things about being young. You can simultaneously feel incredibly free and be completely aware of your vulnerability.

We wanted solitude.

We just didn’t want that much solitude.

The river kept changing. So did we.

Over the years, Nadi Ka Kinaara became one of those places that existed mostly in memory.

I stopped thinking about it regularly.

Life moved on.

Friends got busy. Work happened. People moved cities. Relationships changed. Everyone acquired responsibilities that somehow seemed very serious.

And then, years later, I went back.

Not with the same friends.

Not even with the same generation of friends.

It was 2023.

This time, I was there with my sister’s college friends.

And suddenly there I was again, walking through that landscape.

The funny thing is that I hadn’t apparently grown out of the habit.

The people had changed.

The clothes had definitely changed.

There were more photographs this time.

There was, naturally, a group selfie.

But the instinct was still the same.

Go somewhere open.

Walk around.

Look at the fields.

Look at the water.

Talk nonsense.

Laugh.

Do nothing.

Maybe that is what really stayed with me.

Not the road.

Not the river.

Not even the photographs.

The need for a little bit of nowhere.

What happened to those little escapes?

Delhi has changed enormously around the Yamuna over the years. The floodplain has seen increasing development and competing uses, while the river itself has remained a deeply contested ecological landscape. The DDA’s own planning documents describe significant stretches of the floodplain being converted for different uses. (DDA)

And the Yamuna is not a river I would casually romanticise.

Even during the years when we were going there, the river could be unpredictable. Delhi saw major Yamuna flooding in both 2010 and 2013, including severe flooding around Mayur Vihar in 2013. (DC Central)

So this isn’t a story about discovering a secret picnic spot that I am now recommending everyone rush out to find.

Actually, please don’t.

The landscape around a river is not a theme park, and an old memory is not a safety advisory.

This is a story about something else.

We didn’t know we were making memories

When we were young, we thought memories were made during important things.

Trips.

Birthdays.

Big nights.

Firsts.

Farewells.

We didn’t realise that sometimes memory quietly attaches itself to the most ordinary afternoons.

A muddy road.

A river that was sometimes foamy.

A few friends standing around looking at absolutely nothing.

Someone saying something stupid.

Everyone laughing.

And then getting back into the car and going home.

That’s it.

No grand adventure.

No life-changing revelation.

Just a little break from Delhi.

A little break from ourselves.

Looking at these photographs now, I realise something else.

The older pictures are slightly blurry. The colours are muted. Everyone looks younger, although obviously we didn’t know we were young at the time.

We thought we were just living.

The newer photographs are sharper.

There are more people.

More posing.

More evidence that we were there.

But the landscape still has that familiar feeling.

And perhaps that is why I like coming back to these photographs.

They remind me that before I started worrying about where I was going, I was quite happy simply knowing where I wanted to sit for an hour.

Beside the river.

On a kacchi road.

With people I liked.

Doing absolutely nothing.

And, occasionally, keeping an eye out for suspicious cars.

Because apparently even peace and quiet comes with terms and conditions.

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If you’re looking for the Nadi Ka Kinaara of your own

I wouldn’t treat this old Mayur Vihar riverbank memory as a current travel recommendation. The Yamuna floodplain is environmentally sensitive, conditions change, and access to particular stretches can change too.

But if you’re in Delhi and what you’re really looking for is a little time in nature, rather than another restaurant or mall, there are safer and more established green spaces around the city worth exploring.

And perhaps that is the real recommendation from Nadi Ka Kinaara:

Find somewhere you can sit without having to accomplish anything.

You don’t always need a destination.

Sometimes you just need a place where nobody expects anything from you.

And a friend who knows when to say, “Okay, that car looks suspicious. Let’s go.”

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