Nobody told us about Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan before we arrived.
Not in the travel articles we had read. Not in the forum threads we had gone through three times before booking. Not in any of the usual places where people share what a destination actually contains beyond its most obvious selling point.
We came to The Sirmour Retreat for the terrace and the Shivalik hills and the particular quality of quiet that the property is known for among the people who have stayed there.
We got all of that.
And then on the second morning, over breakfast with the valley below us doing its usual extraordinary thing, one of the team members mentioned Renuka Ji Lake almost as a footnote.
Forty kilometres from the property. Worth your time if you have a free morning.
We had a free morning. We went.
What happened next is the reason I am writing this.
What We Were Not Expecting
My wife Deepa and I are not religious travellers. I say this not as a criticism of anyone who is but as relevant context for what follows.
We go to places for the landscape, for the food, for the quality of being somewhere different from wherever we usually are. Temples and religious sites are beautiful to us architecturally and historically but they are not usually the reason we plan a trip or adjust an itinerary.
When the team at The Sirmour Retreat mentioned that Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan has a temple dedicated to Goddess Renuka and is considered one of the most sacred sites in Himachal Pradesh, I noted it and did not adjust my expectations significantly.
I was wrong to do that.
Not because the spiritual dimension overwhelmed me in some dramatic way. Because the place itself, the lake, the forest around it, the hills behind it, the particular combination of natural and sacred that the site has accumulated across centuries, was something I had not encountered before in quite that form.
We arrived at ten in the morning and did not leave until three in the afternoon.
We had planned to stay for two hours.
The Drive to Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan
The road from The Sirmour Retreat to Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan takes you through some of the most quietly beautiful driving in Sirmour district.
About forty kilometres. An hour or so depending on the road conditions and how often you feel compelled to stop because the view through the windscreen has become more interesting than arriving on time.
We felt compelled to stop twice.
The first time was somewhere in the forest section where the road narrowed and the trees came in close on both sides and the light came through them in the specific way that forest light does when the canopy is dense enough to filter it into something softer than direct sun. Deepa asked me to pull over and we sat in the car for a few minutes with the windows down doing nothing in particular except existing inside that light.
The second time was when the hills opened up and we saw water in the distance for the first time.
The lake was not what I had pictured. I had pictured a large body of water, a ghat, a crowd, the infrastructure of a popular religious site. What appeared in the distance was quieter than that. More contained. More intimate with the landscape around it than I had expected.
I drove the last few kilometres a little slower.
Arriving at Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan for the First Time
Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan is the largest natural lake in Himachal Pradesh.
I tell you this not as a fact to memorise but because standing at the edge of it for the first time, knowing that it is the largest natural lake in the state, you understand something about how the state is proportioned. Because the lake does not feel large in the way that famous large lakes feel large. It feels contained. Held. Like the hills around it have been keeping it carefully since long before anyone started counting things.
The shape of the lake is said to resemble the outline of a reclining woman, which according to the mythology associated with this place is Goddess Renuka herself. I did not see it from the ground. We were told you can see it from above.
What I saw from the ground was a lake that sat in its surroundings with a completeness that made you understand immediately why this place has been considered sacred for as long as it has. Not because someone decided it should be. Because the place itself demands a certain quality of attention that is not different in kind from what people call reverence.
Deepa stood at the edge of the water for a long time without moving.
She is not someone who stands still easily. She is a person who processes experience by moving through it, talking about it, making connections between it and other things.
She stood still.
I stood next to her and did the same.
What Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan Does to You
There is a smaller lake adjacent to the main lake called Parshuram Tal. Named for the son of Goddess Renuka in the mythology of the place. Where Renuka Ji Lake is wide and open and held by the hills, Parshuram Tal is smaller, darker, surrounded more closely by forest.
We walked to it after spending time at the main lake.
The shift in atmosphere between the two was immediate and noticeable. Not frightening. Something more like moving from a wide room into a smaller one that has different acoustics. The sound of the water changed. The quality of the air changed. The trees were closer and the light was different and the whole thing felt like a different register of the same place.
Deepa said: “I feel like we have been here before.”
I knew what she meant without her explaining it. Not déjà vu exactly. Something more like recognition. The way certain places feel like they belong to a category of experience you have had before even when the specific location is entirely new.
We sat near Parshuram Tal for almost an hour.
Nobody asked us to move. Nobody came to sell us anything. Nobody performed the place for us.
It simply existed and we existed inside it and that was the whole arrangement.
The Temple and What We Found There
The temple at Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan is dedicated to Goddess Renuka and sits at the edge of the lake in a way that makes the distinction between the sacred site and the natural site feel intentional rather than arbitrary.
We removed our shoes at the entrance.
The interior was cool in the way old stone buildings are cool, a temperature that has nothing to do with air conditioning and everything to do with mass and age and the particular way that stone holds the absence of heat.
There were other visitors. Not many. Enough to give the place the quality of being alive and attended to without the density that makes famous religious sites feel like they are being processed rather than visited.
An elderly man was sitting near the entrance doing something with his hands that I could not identify from a distance. He looked up when we passed and nodded in the way that people nod in places where speaking feels like the wrong register.
We nodded back.
Inside the temple, Deepa did something I had not seen her do before. She sat down on the cool stone floor, closed her eyes, and stayed like that for about five minutes.
She is not a person who meditates. She is not a person who closes her eyes in public.
When she opened them she looked at me and did not say anything.
I did not ask.
Some things that happen in places like Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan are between the person and the place and need no translation.
What the Wildlife Sanctuary Adds to the Day
Adjacent to Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan is a wildlife sanctuary that adds a completely different dimension to the visit if you have the time for it.
We had the time because we had already abandoned the two hour plan without making a formal decision to do so.
The sanctuary is home to deer, langurs, crocodiles in a protected enclosure, and various bird species that I cannot name accurately but that Deepa photographed with the focus of someone who has been waiting for exactly this.
She is a better photographer than she admits and the light in the sanctuary that afternoon was doing something exceptional with the tree cover.
The langurs were the thing that got me. A group of them in the trees above the path, completely unbothered by our presence, going about their business with the specific disregard that langurs have for the human world. One sat on a branch about four feet above my head and examined me for a long moment before deciding I was not interesting and looking away.
Deepa photographed the entire interaction.
She has sent that photograph to seven people since we came home. Everyone who receives it asks where it was taken.
“Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan is the thing nobody tells you about when they recommend Nahan and the first thing you tell everyone else when you come back. The Sirmour Retreat pointed us there on the second morning and the day it produced is the day both of us talk about most when people ask about this trip. The lake does something. I cannot tell you what exactly. You have to go and find out yourself.”
Deepa, guest at The Sirmour Retreat, Nahan
The Afternoon We Did Not Plan For
By one in the afternoon we had been at Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan for three hours and had not eaten anything since breakfast at The Sirmour Retreat.
We found a small dhaba near the lake entrance. Plastic chairs, a simple menu written on a board, a woman cooking on a gas flame visible through a half open door.
We ordered dal and rice.
What arrived was the kind of meal that simple places sometimes produce when the ingredients are local and nobody is in a hurry and the cooking has been done the same way for a long time without anyone deciding it needed to be updated.
The dal was extraordinary.
I am aware that is a strange sentence to write about a meal eaten on a plastic chair near a lake in Sirmour district. I am writing it anyway because it is true and because one of the things that keeps surprising me about this part of Himachal Pradesh is the consistent quality of simple food made without pretension.
Deepa had two portions.
She never has two portions of dal outside of her mother’s kitchen.
We sat there until two thirty, long past the point where we had finished eating, because leaving required a decision and making decisions felt like the wrong energy for the afternoon.
What The Sirmour Retreat Said When We Got Back
We returned to The Sirmour Retreat at four in the afternoon, three hours later than we had loosely planned, saying nothing on the drive back that needed to be said.
The team asked us how it was.
Deepa said: “Why did you wait until the second morning to mention it?”
The team member smiled and said: “We find that people need one day to settle into the hills before they are ready to receive something like Renuka Ji.”
I have thought about that sentence several times since.
It is a precise and generous thing to say and it is completely accurate. If we had gone on the first morning, fresh from Delhi with our usual pace still running in our systems, we would have seen the lake and the temple and the langurs and come back with good photographs and a pleasant afternoon.
Going on the second morning, after a full day and night at The Sirmour Retreat had done its work on us, we received something different.
We received the place.
Practical Things for Anyone Planning This
Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan is about 40 kilometres from The Sirmour Retreat. The drive takes approximately one hour each way depending on road conditions and how many times you feel the need to stop.
Leave by nine in the morning if you want the lake in the early light before the day fully heats up. The morning quality at the lake is different from the afternoon quality and both are worth experiencing if you have a full day.
Take cash. The dhaba near the entrance does not have a card machine and the meal is worth having.
Wear shoes you can remove easily. You will want to enter the temple and the stone floor inside is worth feeling under your feet.
If the wildlife sanctuary is open, go. The langurs alone are worth an hour of your time.
Come back to The Sirmour Retreat before sunset. The terrace at that hour, after a full day at Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan, produces a specific quality of evening that neither of us had experienced before and have not found elsewhere since.
It is the combination of the two places working together. The lake gives you something and the terrace receives it and together they produce a day that is considerably more than the sum of its parts.
The Thing About Nahan Nobody Is Saying
Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan is one of those places that changes the nature of the destination it is near.
Nahan without Renuka Ji is a beautiful hill town with an extraordinary property in The Sirmour Retreat and a quality of quiet that most places near Delhi cannot offer.
Nahan with Renuka Ji Lake is something more layered than that. A place that has both the landscape that restores you and the sacred site that asks something of you. Both of those things working in combination produce a trip that occupies a different category from the usual hill station weekend.
We came to Nahan for a rest.
We came back from Nahan having had both a rest and an experience of the kind that does not fully process until you have been home for a few days and you are back inside ordinary life and you find yourself thinking about a woman standing at the edge of a lake with her eyes closed on a Tuesday afternoon.
That is Renuka Ji Lake in Nahan.
That is the day trip nobody plans for.
Plan for it.
