A weekend trek into the forests near Mhow ended with two cousins dead, drowned in the same waterfall that has claimed lives for years.

Ajeet Singh, 25, and Anjali Chauhan, 23, were part of a group of five from Indore who'd set out for a long hike through the dense terrain around Choral. It's the kind of trip that's become routine for young people in the city looking to get away from the heat and the traffic for a day. They walked, they climbed, and by the time they reached Lodhiya Kund, exhausted, the water must have looked like exactly what they needed.

Simrol police say the group stopped to bathe at the falls after the trek. Two of them, Ajeet and Anjali, went into deeper water. And that's where it went wrong. Both started drowning, according to the police account, with the other three unable to pull them out in time.

Villagers from nearby got there first. They pulled both bodies from the water before police arrived. Ajeet, son of Bhupendra Chauhan, lived in Gauri Nagar. Anjali, daughter of Devi Singh Chauhan, was from Veena Nagar in Sukhlia. Both bodies have been sent to Mhow Civil Hospital for post-mortem, standard procedure in an unnatural death.

This isn't new territory for Lodhiya Kund. The spot, along with nearby picnic points like Tincha Falls, sits inside Simrol police station's jurisdiction and has built up a grim record over the years. Officials investigating these cases keep coming back to the same explanations: tourists misjudge how deep the water actually is, currents run stronger under the surface than they look, and the rocky bed hides whirlpools that don't announce themselves until someone's already caught in one.

None of that is new information to anyone who's grown up around Indore. These falls get flagged every monsoon season. And every monsoon season, groups still show up, because a waterfall after a good trek is hard to resist when you're twenty-something and it's hot.

Local authorities have repeated the same advice they give after every incident here — stay out of deep natural water, follow posted safety warnings, don't assume a calm surface means a shallow bottom. Whether that advice actually keeps people away from spots like Lodhiya Kund is a separate question, and going by the site's history, not one anyone's answered yet.

Police have not said whether any case will be registered beyond the standard drowning report. The post-mortem results are awaited.