Loktak is the largest freshwater lake in northeast India, and the land on it floats. Across the water, in the state of Manipur, lie hundreds of phumdi: thick mats of reed, soil and rotted plants that drift and fuse into islands. They live by a yearly rhythm. In the dry months they settle onto the lakebed, draw up nutrients and thicken, then rise again with the water. Fishermen build huts on them and live out there. They also cut them up: strips of mat are sliced to size and lashed into rings 200 to 250 metres around, anchored where the water runs deep, with a net laid inside. The penned fish are fed for three or four months, and come out heavier than anything taken from the open lake. Hundreds of those circles pattern the surface, and you thread the channels between them in a fisherman's dugout.
Along the reedy edge the fishing hamlets stand propped in the shallows on bamboo frames, the nets and traps close enough for you to see how each is built. At the southern end floats the largest mat of all, Keibul Lamjao, the only floating national park anywhere and the last ground of the sangai. The deer was taken for extinct by 1950; six were found alive here in 1953, and the park exists because of those six. It is called the dancing deer for its bouncing step, which spreads its weight so the springy mat does not give under it. Sangai keep to the reed line, so you scan the edge of the meadow from the towers on Pabot and Chingjao hills in the first hours after dawn, when they come out to feed. Sendra is a forested hilltop the lake wraps around, and you reach it by causeway from Moirang, with water on three sides and phumdi scattered to the ring of hills. A hydro barrage built in the 1980s holds the water high all year, so many islands can no longer touch bottom to feed. They are getting thinner under everything that stands on them.