Everything in Delhi is going fine. Then one morning, Napu goes to say his usual hello to the pond behind Lodhi Garden — the one with the friendly turtles and the fish who love to gossip — and stops dead.
The pond is half empty. Not "hasn't rained in a while" empty. Overnight empty. The water level has dropped so much that the lily pads are sitting on cracked mud instead of floating.
"Uh... hello?" Napu calls out, worried.
A very grumpy, very muddy turtle drags himself up onto a dry rock. "Oh, good, you're here. Do you see this? DO YOU SEE THIS?"
"Bhola, what happened?"
"What happened," Bhola the turtle says, "is I went to sleep in perfectly good water last night, and I woke up basically camping. CAMPING, Napu. I am a turtle. I do not camp."
Napu runs to get Dogsy. "It's not just this pond," Dogsy says, checking his phone. "People are posting about it everywhere. Three ponds, two lakes, and half the neighborhood wells all dropped overnight. Nobody knows why."
"That doesn't happen naturally," Napu says. "Water doesn't just vanish in one night."
"Someone's taking it," Dogsy says.
They call Bytes, who shows up already holding a tiny cup of water like he's protecting the last drop in Delhi personally. "I heard the news. I am RATIONING," he announces. "One sip per hour."
"Bytes, that's a thimble of water."
"Exactly. Very responsible of me."
They head straight to the pond, where Napu — who doesn't just talk to snakes, remember, he talks to every creature that lives in water — gets to work asking around.
Bhola the turtle is first, still sulking on his rock. "I don't know why it happened, but I know WHEN. Middle of the night. I heard this low rumbling sound, like a big machine, somewhere underground. Went on for maybe an hour. Then in the morning — this." He gestures sadly at the mud.
A little frog named Gulgul hops up next, looking personally offended. "I was THIS close to catching the best fly of my life when the water dropped under me mid-jump. Mid-JUMP, Napu. Do you know how embarrassing that is?"
"Very sorry, Gulgul. Anything useful, though?"
"Useful? Fine. There was a truck. A big tanker truck, parked near the old water pipe by the park gate. I saw it because its headlights woke me up, rude honestly. It left really fast when the sun started coming up."
A fish named Sona pokes her head above the shrinking water. "I can add to that. The rumbling? It was coming from underground, through a pipe that runs right past where I live. I followed the sound with my fins as far as I could — it goes toward the old water station near the market, then splits off somewhere I couldn't follow. Sorry, I don't have legs."
"You've got fins, Sona, don't apologize," Dogsy grins.
A duck named Chulbul lands with a splash — or tries to, since there's barely any water left to splash into. "I saw the same truck! Actually, I've seen it three nights in a row now. Same truck, same time, always near that pipe. I thought maybe it was just doing repairs, but repairs don't usually happen at 2 AM with the headlights off."
"Headlights off at 2 AM is not a repair job," Napu says. "That's someone hiding."
They follow the trail — the old pipe, the water station near the market, and from there, tire tracks leading to a walled compound at the edge of the neighborhood with a sign that reads "Bansal Water Supply — Fast & Reliable!"
Peeking through a gap in the wall, they see it: dozens of tanker trucks, and underground, a huge illegal pump siphoning water straight out of the groundwater table — the same water that feeds every pond, well, and lake in the area — filling truck after truck to sell at high prices during a "shortage" that this exact operation is causing.
A tired-looking man in a dusty shirt, Mr. Bansal, is overseeing it all, checking off a clipboard.
"Excuse me," Dogsy says, stepping out. "Are you aware you're draining the entire neighborhood dry?"
Mr. Bansal jumps, dropping his clipboard. "Who— how did you—"
"The turtles noticed," Napu says flatly. "And the frogs. And the fish. And a very annoyed duck."
"Look," Mr. Bansal says, hands raised, "the tube well is legal, technically, I have a permit for a SMALL amount—"
"This is not a small amount," Napu says, gesturing at the rows of trucks.
Mr. Bansal's shoulders drop. "Business has been bad. Everyone's got their own water tanks now, nobody needs deliveries. So when the ponds started running a little low naturally last summer, I thought — if there's a shortage, people panic, and panicked people pay double for water delivery. So I helped the 'shortage' along a little. Just a little pump, running at night, nobody would notice—"
"Bhola noticed," Napu says. "He's very upset about the camping situation."
"The what?"
"Don't worry about it."
"You didn't just help a shortage along," Dogsy says. "You created it. And now there's no water for the turtles, the fish, the frogs, or the actual people who live here."
Mr. Bansal looks down at his shoes, genuinely ashamed. "I didn't think about the ponds. I was only thinking about my trucks."
"You need to shut the pump down. Today," Napu says.
"And you need to tell the water department exactly what you did," Dogsy adds, "so they can fix the groundwater properly, not just patch it."
Mr. Bansal does exactly that. The illegal pump gets sealed. The water department, with Bytes cheerfully "consulting" (mostly by standing nearby holding his thimble of water importantly), sets up proper rainwater harvesting pits around the neighborhood so the ground refills the right way, slowly and safely, instead of getting drained by a hidden pipe at 2 AM.
It takes about two weeks, but the ponds creep back up, inch by inch. Bhola the turtle gets his water back and immediately un-sulks completely, floating around like nothing happened. Gulgul catches an even better fly than the one he lost and will not stop talking about it. Sona does a happy little splash-jump. Chulbul the duck paddles proud laps around the whole pond, announcing to anyone who'll listen that HE found the truck first, actually, no matter what the frog says.
Mr. Bansal, meanwhile, starts a new, much smaller, much more honest business — fixing leaky pipes for people instead of secretly causing the leaks in the first place.
That evening, Bytes finally takes a real gulp of water from a full glass, sighs with enormous relief, and announces, "The rationing is officially over. I was very brave through all of this, by the way."
"You had a thimble, Bytes."
"A very responsible thimble."