Everything in Delhi is going fine. Kids are playing cricket in the lanes, eating ice cream, losing at carrom, having a normal, boring, perfectly nice day.
Then one morning, everything gets... hairy.
Dogsy wakes up, walks past his neighbor's kid — seven-year-old Bunty — and does a double take. Bunty has a moustache. A full, proper, curly moustache. On a seven-year-old.
"Bunty?" Dogsy blinks. "Since when do you have a moustache?"
Bunty, looking extremely confused and also slightly proud, touches his own face. "I don't know! I woke up and it was just... there! Also I think I grew two inches. My pants don't fit."
Dogsy runs to find Napu, who is standing outside, staring at a group of kids on the street — all of whom look distinctly older than they did yesterday. One ten-year-old now has a full beard. A five-year-old has sideburns. It's chaos. It's hilarious. It's also very worrying.
"Napu! Have you seen—"
"The beards? Yes. Everywhere. I saw a toddler with a moustache thicker than mine."
"This isn't normal," Dogsy says.
"Obviously not," Napu says. "Kids don't grow beards overnight. Or grow two inches overnight. Something is very wrong."
They call Bytes immediately. He shows up, and even he — a mouse — has somehow grown a tiny, ridiculous set of whiskers-on-whiskers.
"Bytes, why do you have MORE whiskers than usual?"
Bytes looks at his own reflection in a puddle, horrified. "I— what— since when—"
"Okay, this is happening to everyone," Dogsy says. "Let's figure out what's going on."
First, they try testing the kids themselves. Dogsy checks Bunty's pulse (normal). Napu checks his height against a wall (definitely taller than yesterday). Bytes tries to run a "science test" which mostly involves him poking Bunty's moustache with a stick and going "hmm" very seriously.
"Do you know what's wrong with him?" Dogsy asks.
"No," Bytes admits. "But I looked very smart doing it, right?"
"Not really."
They test three more kids. Same results: taller, hairier, and absolutely no clue why. Dogsy even tries talking to Bunty like he talks to animals, just in case it helps. It does not help. Bunty just says "please stop staring at my face" a lot.
"We need actual help," Napu says. "Real science. Let's call the Professor."
Professor Chaddha is an old friend of Napu's family — a proper, wild-haired, extremely excitable scientist who lives three streets away in a house absolutely full of beakers, bubbling tubes, and at least one exploded ceiling fan from an experiment gone wrong. He shows up wearing his lab coat inside out.
"Show me the moustache boy," Professor Chaddha says immediately, no hello, nothing.
Bunty is presented. The Professor examines him with a magnifying glass, taps his knee with a tiny hammer for absolutely no reason, and finally says, "Aha. Yes. I suspected as much."
"Suspected what?" Dogsy asks.
"There is a chemical inside his body," the Professor announces dramatically. "A growth chemical. Somebody has exposed this child — and clearly, half of Delhi's children — to something that speeds up growing. Hair, height, everything."
"How did it get inside him?" Napu asks.
"That," says the Professor, "is the real question. Chemicals like this don't just appear inside people. It has to enter somehow. Through food? Water? Or—" he pauses dramatically, "—the air."
They test the air using one of the Professor's strange gadgets — a little device that beeps and turns purple when it senses something wrong. Napu holds it up outside. It beeps immediately and turns bright, alarming purple.
"It's in the air," the Professor confirms. "All over the city. Whoever did this released it everywhere."
"Okay, but who? And where from?" Dogsy asks.
This is where Dogsy's real talent comes in — talking to every animal in Delhi. He calls out, and animals start reporting in from all over the city.
Sheru shows up first — and he now has the fluffiest, most magnificent lion-like mane a street dog has ever had. He looks extremely pleased about it.
"Sheru, you look... very majestic."
"I know," Sheru says, shaking his mane like a shampoo commercial. "Anyway, yes, I noticed something too — there's a weird smell in the wind, coming from the east. Very chemical-y. Made my nose itch."
A flock of pigeons reports the same thing — a strange smell blowing in from the east, near the old industrial road. A cat mentions her whiskers have doubled in length overnight too and confirms the same direction.
"East it is," Napu says.
They follow the smell, animals guiding them the whole way — birds flying ahead to scout, Sheru sniffing the ground like a furry compass — until they reach a small, forgotten building at the edge of the industrial road, smoke quietly puffing from a cracked vent on the roof.
Inside, they find a stressed, exhausted-looking scientist surrounded by tanks of glowing green gas, muttering to himself and frantically flipping through notebooks.
"Stop right there!" Napu announces.
The scientist jumps, knocking over a beaker. "Oh no, oh no, you found me—wait, are you here about the beards? I can explain!"
"Please do," Dogsy says, arms crossed.
The man introduces himself as Dr. Verma. "My daughter — she has a condition. She's eight years old but her body won't grow properly. Doctors said there's nothing they can do. So I built a growth formula, just for her, to help her grow at a normal pace like other kids. But the containment tank cracked last night, and it leaked out through the vents and into the wind, and it spread across the whole city instead of just... her."
Professor Chaddha examines the tanks. "This formula is unstable. Powerful, but wildly unstable. You didn't test this properly before making so much of it."
"I know," Dr. Verma says, voice breaking. "I was desperate. I just wanted her to grow up normally. I didn't think about anyone else."
Dogsy sits down next to him. "We understand wanting to help someone you love. But you can't fix one person by accidentally changing hundreds of kids across the city."
"I know that now," Dr. Verma says. "Please — help me fix it. I don't want any child stuck looking like a confused uncle forever."
Professor Chaddha and Dr. Verma work together at the tanks, mixing a counter-formula — a "reverse mist" that should undo the growth spike safely. Napu calls in birds to help spread it evenly across the whole city, since it needs to travel exactly the way the original chemical did.
Within an hour, the green mist is replaced with a soft, shimmering silver one, drifting gently over every rooftop in Delhi.
Slowly, moustaches shrink. Heights go back to normal. Bunty's pants fit again. Sheru's magnificent mane deflates back to his regular scruffy self, and he looks personally offended about it.
"Wait," Sheru says. "I liked the mane."
"Sorry, buddy," Dogsy laughs.
Dr. Verma is taken by the science council — not to be punished harshly, but to properly register his research this time, with real safety testing, and real help for his daughter through legal channels.
Bunty runs up to Dogsy, moustache-free and delighted. "I'm a kid again! Although," he adds, sounding almost disappointed, "the moustache was kind of cool."
"You'll grow one properly one day," Napu grins. "The normal way. Very, very slowly."
That evening, Bytes checks his whiskers in the puddle one more time — completely normal-sized again — and sighs with something that sounds suspiciously like relief mixed with disappointment.
"For science," he mutters, "I really thought I looked distinguished."