Iqbal Sheikh is 16 years old and, over the past five years, has spent much of his life in a pond.
It was not a whim or a game: as soon as he got out of the water, his skin would burn in a way that no doctor in Murshidabad, his hometown in West Bengal, could explain. His family took him to hospitals and also to traditional healers. Nothing worked. At one point, even Iqbal himself began to think it was the work of a jinn, a supernatural force, because there was no other explanation at hand. The money ran out before the answers, and the treatments were discontinued.
iqbal sheikh the boy who has been living in pond for 5 years pic.twitter.com/e4XhEMzh3l
— @Trecopo (@Trecopo1) August 20, 2026
What changed everything was a video: watching him eat and live inside the water went viral, and those images reached Anant Ambani, son of tycoon Mukesh Ambani, who decided to pay for his flight to Mumbai. Iqbal is now being treated at Sir HN Reliance Foundation Hospital, where doctors suspect erythromelalgia, a rare disease that causes burning pain and redness in the skin. The diagnosis has not yet been confirmed, but for the first time in five years, someone is seriously looking for the answer.