The monsoon came forty days late.

Maya’s village in Rajasthan used to flood the dry riverbed by July, but this year the sand stayed hot enough to burn her feet through her chappals. The old banyan tree where her grandfather taught her to count stars had dropped all its leaves in April, and they never grew back.

“Why is the sky angry, Maa?” Maya asked, watching the empty clouds. Her mother didn’t answer, just tied another wet cloth over the earthen pot to keep the last of the drinking water cool. The government tanker had come only twice this month. Fights broke out both times.

At school, the fan moved hot air around. The new chapter in Science was about glaciers. Maya stared at the picture of blue ice mountains while sweat dripped onto her notebook. Her teacher, Mrs. Sharma, explained carbon dioxide and factories and melting ice caps. “The Earth is getting a fever,” she said. Maya thought of her own fever last summer when the heat made her dizzy for three days.

That evening, Maya walked to the dried pond. Cracks split the earth like broken promises. She remembered when it was full, when buffaloes bathed and kingfishers dived. Now plastic bags clung to the thorns. A dead fish, its eyes boiled white by the sun, lay in the dust.

Her little brother Rohan coughed through the night. The doctor said it was the dust and the smoke from the brick kilns that burned coal day and night to build houses for the city. “His lungs are weak,” the doctor said. “The air is changing.”

Maya took her brother to the only tree left with shade, a neem near the temple. Its leaves were dusty but alive. She collected fallen neem seeds in her skirt. The next morning, before the sun could get angry, she went back to the cracked pond. She dug small holes with a broken spoon, one for each seed, all around the dead pond’s edge.

Old Mr. Khan, who sold vegetables, saw her. “Beta, nothing grows without water.”

Maya wiped her forehead. “Maybe the rain will remember if we ask it to.”

She came back every dawn for a week. On the eighth day, the sky turned the color of iron. The first drop hit the dust and vanished. Then another. Then the sky opened. It wasn’t a monsoon, just a short, confused rain, but it was enough. The cracks drank. The air smelled like hope.

Two months later, tiny green shoots pushed through the mud around the pond. Not all of them lived. But three did. Three small neem trees, standing like green excuses against the brown earth. Rohan sat under the oldest neem and his cough was quieter.

Maya didn’t save the world. But when the next summer came and the heat rose again, there were three more patches of shade in her village than before.