The introduction urges attention to the ordinary practices through which settlements have been constructed in Mumbai. Focusing on the process through which a resident finds a way to repair her water pipe, this chapter suggests that Mumbai’s water infrastructure is a living, breathing, leaking assemblage composed as much of steel and cement as of “nature,” laws, social histories, and political practices. By attending to the iterative relations between Mumbai’s residents, and their social-material relations to pipes, plumbers, and municipal engineers, the introduction lays out the book’s central argument: hydraulic citizenship, the ability of residents to be recognized by city agencies through legitimate water services, is an intermittent, partial, and multiply constituted social and material process. The materialities and socialities that have accreted around modern water distribution infrastructures not only assist in but also perforate, interrupt and sit alongside powerful efforts to constitute liberal cities and subjects in Mumbai.