In Reddypuram Kovelakunta, a village in the Warangal district of Telangana, India, the residents saw something they did not want to see: a body floating motionless in the pond, not moving since seven in the morning.
They called the police. They said he had been like that for five hours. No one doubted that he was a corpse.
The officers arrived around noon. They went into the water, grabbed him by the arms, and began dragging him toward the shore, with the clumsy care used when handling the dead.
And then the man opened his eyes.
He shook himself, coughed, and looked around without understanding why half the town was surrounding him with those expressions. The police officers, who just a second earlier had been carrying a lifeless body, backed away like someone who had seen a ghost.
It wasn’t a ghost. He was a quarry worker from Kavali, in the Nellore district, who had spent ten straight days breaking stones under the Telangana sun. That day, he got into the water to cool off. Exhaustion did the rest: he fell asleep floating, oblivious to the world, while the entire town thought he was dead.
The video, recorded by a witness and shared on social media in June 2024, shows that exact second: the moment fear turns into relief, and an exhausted man rises from the water as if returning from somewhere else.
Sometimes death and sleep look far too much alike. Luckily, this time, it was only sleep.