Powai Lake Promenade

Powai Lake is the quiet counterweight to Mumbai's famous coastline — a broad sheet of fresh water folded into the hills of the north-eastern suburbs, where the traffic noise thins and wooded ridges stand reflected on a still morning.

• The lakeside promenade is the easiest way to meet it: a paved, railed walkway along the built-up shore, lit after dark and busy from first light with walkers, joggers, students and families, with benches turned towards the water and the green far bank.
• On a clear winter day the lake reads as a single silver plate ringed by forest, apartment towers rising behind you and nothing but trees ahead.
• The lake is a piece of Victorian municipal engineering rather than a natural water body.
• It was created at the end of the nineteenth century, the dam across the valley completed in the early 1890s, to ease colonial Bombay's chronic water shortage, and it takes its name from the old Powai village that stood here.
• It long ago ceased to be a drinking-water source; today its value is as an urban wetland and a green lung.
• The campus of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay holds much of the far shore, the hills towards Sanjay Gandhi National Park close the northern horizon, and the planned neighbourhood of Powai meets the water on the near side.
• Bring binoculars if you have them.
• Egrets, pond herons, cormorants and darters work the shallows, kingfishers hold the reeds and railings, and the count rises through the cool months.
• Powai is also known for a resident population of mugger crocodiles, occasionally sighted from the bank — which, along with the water quality and the mats of water hyacinth that spread in some seasons, is a very good reason never to enter the water.
• Access is free and open, an hour is plenty, and the two golden windows are roughly 6 to 8 in the morning, when the surface is glassy, and the hour before sunset.
• Eating well here takes a little care rather than luck.
• Powai is restaurant-dense and broadly mixed, so head for kitchens that display their vegetarian credentials rather than assuming.
• Within a kilometre or two, around the Hiranandani Gardens lanes and the Powai market area, are counter-service South Indian places doing idli, medu vada and ghee-roast dosas, Gujarati and Jain thali kitchens, and chaat, pav bhaji and falooda counters — several run strictly pure-vegetarian while their immediate neighbours do not.
• Look for a clearly displayed pure-veg board, or simply ask, before you order, and say plainly if you also want the food made without egg or without onion and garlic; Mumbai kitchens take that request in their stride.