Loktak Lake is patterned with near-perfect green rings that look from the air like crop circles drawn on the water. They are fish pens. The lake carries hundreds of floating islands called phumdis — thick, buoyant mats of tangled vegetation, soil and rotting plant matter that drift and fuse across the surface. Fishermen shape some of them into circular corrals, athaphum, and that is what scatters the lake with rings. Loktak is the largest freshwater lake in Northeast India, covering roughly 300 square kilometres and swelling and shrinking through the year. At its southern edge floats Keibul Lamjao, the only floating national park on Earth — a single phumdi thick enough to walk on. It is the last refuge of the sangai, an endangered brow-antlered deer found nowhere else, light enough on its feet to cross the springy mat without breaking through.
On the water the scale turns quiet. At dawn mist lifts off the reeds while fishermen pole slender wooden canoes between the islands and cast weighted nets across the shallows. Egrets and herons drop into the shallows to feed, and through winter migratory ducks raft on the open lake. From Sendra Hill at the lake's edge the whole expanse opens below you — a mirror studded with green islands and the blue circles of the pens, a pattern only height reveals. As the light shifts, lakeside huts and bamboo traps reflect on the still water, and the place feels half-land, half-water. Loktak is a working lake under strain. A hydroelectric barrage built in the 1980s holds the water artificially high, straining the floating islands and the deer that depend on them. Manipur has also seen ethnic unrest since 2023, and several governments still advise against non-essential travel to the state.