CHAPTER 12 — BOOK PUBLISHING
The manuscript made its way to the dining table on the morning of the twenty-first, which felt, to Raghav, like a small ceremony in itself — three weeks of his desk, and now suddenly it belonged to breakfast.
His sister spotted the cover sketch before anyone had even sat down properly, planting one finger on the rough dinosaur skull Raghav had doodled in the corner weeks ago.
"Big lizard?" she asked, with the gravity of someone conducting a final inspection.
"Still big," Raghav confirmed.
Satisfied, she went back to her toast, and the rest of the table, for reasons Raghav didn't entirely understand, found this hilarious.
His father closed the last page, set it down, and folded his hands on top of it the way he did before saying something he'd clearly been rehearsing. "So."
Everyone looked at him.
"What happens now?"
Nobody answered right away. The manuscript sat there, finished — properly finished, both departments signed off, mother's pencil and father's small careful notes crowding every margin — and for a moment the whole family just looked at it like it might answer the question itself.
"We could send it to publishers," his father offered.
"Do we need an agent for that?" his mother asked.
"I don't think we need either," Raghav said.
Both of them looked at him.
He'd thought about how to say this without sounding like he already knew exactly how the industry worked, which, strictly speaking, he did. "An unknown writer sending an unsolicited manuscript to a publisher waits months just to get a rejection letter. If someone actually says yes, it's another year before it reaches a shelf — and by then, they choose the cover, the price, the release date, everything. We'd have almost no say in any of it."
"So what's the alternative?" his mother asked.
Raghav took a breath. "We publish it ourselves."
The silence that followed had a very specific texture — the particular quiet of two parents recalculating, in real time, exactly how ambitious their son had turned out to be.
---
"With what money?" his father said, not unkindly, but with the flat practicality of a man who'd just done rough arithmetic in his head and not liked the number he'd landed on. "Printing thousands of books isn't fr—"
"Can dinosaurs eat toast?"
Everyone paused. His sister looked up at the table with the specific innocence of someone who had been waiting patiently for a gap in the adult conversation and had simply decided this was it.
"Some of them, maybe," his mother said, straight-faced, already reaching for the teapot the way she did whenever a conversation was about to get serious. "Finish yours first."
His sister accepted this with a small, satisfied nod and went back to her plate, and his father resumed as though he'd never been interrupted at all. "Printing thousands of books isn't free, Raghav."
"I know." Raghav got up and came back a minute later with his own notebook, the one that had nothing to do with dinosaurs. He opened it to the page he'd updated that morning and turned it around so his father could see. The newest line sat neatly beneath the earlier calculations.
145.3
He'd circled it before breakfast, the same way he circled every entry that mattered. The market had done exactly what he'd expected — only faster. "The yen's above one forty-five now. When we opened the position, we kept thirty thousand in reserve — not invested, just sitting there in case the trade went against us before it went our way. That was the whole point of it. Insurance."
His father studied the numbers, visibly slower to trust them than Raghav would have liked, though not, Raghav noted, unwilling.
Without a word, he got up and disappeared into the bedroom, returning a few minutes later with a calculator and a legal pad. He worked through the numbers himself, unhurried, tapping his pencil against the pad between calculations the way he always did when he was thinking rather than stalling, recalculating the remaining safety margin twice before he was satisfied, and only then looked back up. "And now?"
"Now the trade's already moved further in our favor than I expected this early. We don't need thirty thousand dollars of cushion anymore — even if the yen corrected badly tomorrow, we'd still be nowhere close to needing that much protection before June." He tapped the page. "We can pull ten to fifteen thousand out of the reserve without touching the position itself. Not one dollar of what's actually invested moves.
We're just carrying less insurance because the thing we insured against is less likely now."
His father read the numbers again, more carefully this time, the specific care of an engineer checking someone else's math before he'd sign off on it. "You're not closing any part of the trade."
"No. I'm still holding for yen to reach at least 149. This is just — " Raghav searched for the word his father would trust most. "Risk management. Not a new bet."
His father looked back down at his own legal pad once more, checking the last line against Raghav's notebook, and nodded slowly. "You're right." He set the calculator down like a man setting down an argument he'd lost fairly, then sat with it a moment longer before looking at his wife, some silent negotiation passing between them that Raghav had learned, over the last month, not to try to read too closely.
Nobody spoke for a few seconds. His mother got up, poured three cups of tea nobody had asked for, and set them down without comment, which was, Raghav had come to understand, simply what she did whenever a conversation had gotten more serious than the kitchen table usually saw.
"Eleven thousand," his mother said finally. "From money that was already just sitting there."
"From money that was already just sitting there," Raghav agreed.
His father exhaled, and reached for the calculator again, turning it over in his hand without actually using it. "It's not really the money that bothers me."
His mother looked at him. "Then what?"
"He's thirteen." He said it simply, not as an accusation, just a fact he needed to say out loud. "Trade, printing, business plans. When did any of this become normal for us?"
"Around the time he saved a factory," his mother said, not entirely joking, and reached over to straighten the stack of papers on the table that didn't particularly need straightening. "I worry about the same thing you do. I worry about him being tired more than I worry about him being wrong." She glanced at Raghav. "How did you even think of all this?"
"I didn't, not all at once," Raghav said, which was as honest an answer as he could safely give. "One piece led to the next."
His father let out a breath that was almost a laugh, setting the calculator down at last. "You've been planning this for a while."
"A few days," Raghav said, which was almost entirely true.
---
It was at that exact moment that his sister disappeared from the table without a word, which nobody thought much of until she came back a minute later dragging her piggy bank across the floor with both arms, the ceramic pig scraping audibly against the tile.
She heaved it up onto the table, directly on top of the manuscript, and looked around at everyone with tremendous seriousness.
"For dinosaur," she announced.
The table went completely silent for a second, and then his mother laughed so suddenly she had to cover her mouth, and his father made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and something considerably softer than that.
Raghav knelt down next to her chair, matching her seriousness as closely as he could manage. "I think," he said, "we just found our biggest investor."
She beamed at that, clearly understanding none of it and thoroughly pleased regardless.
"We'll keep this one in reserve," Raghav told her gently, sliding the piggy bank back toward her. "Just in case."
She seemed to find this an entirely acceptable arrangement, and toddled off with her pig held against her chest like she'd just closed the most important deal of the morning.
---
They spent the better part of the next two days visiting printers, and the first two visits told Raghav almost everything he needed to know within about ten minutes each.
The first place was large and immaculate, all steel and fluorescent light, and the man behind the desk barely looked up from his ledger long enough to quote a number that made Raghav's father's jaw tighten slightly.
He talked about "the client" the way you'd talk about a category rather than a person, and when Raghav asked a specific question about print quality, the man answered his father instead, as though the question had somehow rerouted itself around the thirteen-year-old who'd actually asked it.
The second place was smaller, cheaper, and immediately less reassuring — a low ceiling, one working machine and one that clearly wasn't, a smell of hot metal and something faintly burnt that nobody in the family found comforting. The owner was friendly enough, but his estimate for the interior paper stock made Raghav quietly certain the pages would start yellowing within a year.
Neither felt right, and by the time they climbed back into the car after the second visit, his mother had already started making a face that meant she was thinking the same thing Raghav was.
---
The third place changed everything within about thirty seconds of walking in.
It was a mid-sized shop on a street lined with auto parts stores and a laundromat, the front window stenciled *SUNRISE PRINT & BINDERY* in gold letters that had clearly been touched up more than once. Inside, the air smelled like ink and warm paper, and somewhere behind a partition a machine was running with a steady, rhythmic clatter that Raghav found, for reasons he didn't entirely examine, weirdly comforting.
The owner came out from behind the counter before anyone had said a word — a broad, energetic man in his fifties with reading glasses pushed up into gray hair, who introduced himself as Deepak Malhotra and shook Raghav's hand first, before either of his parents', which Raghav noticed and appreciated more than he let show.
"So," Malhotra said, glancing at the folder Raghav's mother was holding. "This is the author?"
"That's me," Raghav said.
Most adults, at that point in a conversation, made some small adjustment in their face — a flicker of amusement, or doubt, or the specific condescension people reserved for children claiming grown-up things. Malhotra didn't do any of that. He simply nodded, held out a hand for the sample pages, and actually read them, standing right there at the counter, for a solid two minutes while the family waited.
"Dinosaurs," he said eventually, looking up.
"Dinosaurs," Raghav confirmed.
"Good hook." He set the pages down and looked at Raghav properly for the first time, the way you'd look at someone whose work you'd just decided to take seriously. "Come. Let's talk about how many of these we're making."
Somewhere behind them, Raghav's sister had found a stack of blank paper stock nearly as tall as she was and was inspecting it with the same solemn authority she brought to everything. She leaned in close, as though sharing a secret only the paper itself deserved to hear.
"Future dinosaurs," she whispered.
Malhotra, who had clearly not expected to be addressed by the youngest member of the party, laughed out loud. "It's amazing," he said, shaking his head, "how children think."
---
He walked them through the back of the shop as he talked, past the working presses, past stacks of paper stock in a dozen different weights that he ran his thumb across like a man checking fabric. Raghav's sister, trailing behind, knocked a small stack of sample brochures off a low shelf with her elbow; Malhotra scooped them back into a rough pile without breaking stride, entirely unbothered.
"Offset printing," he explained, "means we make plates first — one for each page, essentially, though it's more efficient than that sounds once you're running real volume. That's where most of your upfront cost sits. Setup." He held up a finished sample from another job, turning it under the light so they could see the paper grain. "Paperback, standard trade size, this stock here — good enough that it won't yellow in a year, not so expensive you're paying for something a reader won't notice."
They passed an old, hulking machine shoved into the corner, clearly retired, its paint chipped down to bare metal in places. Raghav's father slowed to look at it.
"That one still work?"
"Barely. Haven't run it in three years." Malhotra rested a hand on it anyway, almost fondly. "First press I ever bought. Printed church newsletters on it, wedding invitations, one very confused set of election flyers for a man who lost badly. I keep meaning to sell it for scrap." He didn't sound like a man who meant it at all. "Never printed anything with dinosaurs on that one, though. That's a first for the shop."
"And the cover?" his mother asked, steering them gently back toward business.
"Heavier stock, glossy or matte, your choice. I'd suggest matte for something like this — a little more serious-looking, and it won't scratch as easily on a shelf." He glanced at Raghav. "You have art for it?"
"Working on it," Raghav said, which was mostly true.
Malhotra nodded like that was a perfectly reasonable answer, and kept walking. "Turnaround, once everything's finalized on your end, is ten to fourteen days for a run this size. Faster if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong."
---
"How many copies were you thinking?" he asked, once they'd settled at a small table near the back, sample stock spread out between them like a hand of cards.
"A thousand," his father said, before Raghav could answer.
Malhotra didn't respond to that directly. He pulled a pad toward himself and started writing, half to himself. "At a thousand, most of what you're paying for is setup — plates, prepress, all the fixed stuff. Doesn't care if you print one copy or ten thousand. So your cost per book's going to be high." He scratched at the pad, crossed something out. "Three thousand, that setup cost spreads out more, unit price drops." He tapped the pad again, harder. "Five..." He scratched his chin. "Five's where this actually starts making sense. You're paying for the setup once instead of paying for it twice."
"Five thousand feels like a lot to gamble on," his mother said carefully.
"It is," Raghav said. "But the setup cost is a one-time thing, whatever we choose. If we print a thousand and it sells, we're back here in a month paying full setup again for another small run — which means paying twice for the same fixed cost, and losing weeks we could've spent selling instead of waiting on a second production run." He looked at his parents. "If it doesn't sell at all, the number barely matters — we've lost money either way. But if it *does* sell, five thousand is the version where we're not scrambling."
Malhotra looked at him for a long moment, something shifting behind his eyes. "Who taught you offset economics?"
"You did," Raghav said.
Malhotra blinked.
"Just now," Raghav added, and let himself smile.
Malhotra laughed, properly this time, head tipping back. "Fair enough." He glanced at Raghav's parents, still faintly delighted. "He's thinking like a publisher," he said. "Not like an author."
His father laughed, a little helplessly, and — clearly unable to resist — added, "He's been reading the financial pages since he was twelve."
"Papa." Raghav felt his ears go warm despite himself, which struck him as an entirely unreasonable thing for his body to be doing at this particular moment in either of his two lives.
"It's true," his father said, entirely unrepentant.
---
The number Malhotra wrote down at the bottom of the pad, once everything was accounted for, came to eleven thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars.
His father studied it for a long moment, and then, in the tone of a man who'd negotiated exactly nothing in his life until this year and was determined not to let that show, said, "Round numbers make contracts easier."
Malhotra laughed. "That's not how pricing works."
"It could be, today."
"It really isn't." But he was already tapping his pen against the pad, thinking, clearly enjoying himself more than the numbers alone accounted for. "I can come down on my margin a little. Not a lot — I'm not a charity." He crossed out the figure and wrote a new one beneath it, closer to eleven and a half.
His father looked at the new number, then back at Malhotra, and said nothing at all, which turned out to be its own kind of negotiation. Malhotra held his gaze for a second, sighed theatrically, and crossed the number out again.
*$11,000.*
"There," Malhotra said. "Now we've both given something up. That's how you know it's a fair number."
Then he set the pen down entirely and looked at the three of them — four, if you counted Raghav's sister, currently attempting to climb onto an unattended pallet of paper — with something that had shifted from businessman to something closer to genuinely interested.
"I know some stores," he said. "Independent ones, not the big chains — owners who trust my judgment because I've never sent them junk. If the book's actually good, and I think it might be, I could place the first thousand copies myself. Save you the trouble of walking into every shop cold."
The offer sat in the air for a second before anyone responded.
"Why would you do that?" his mother asked, not suspicious, just genuinely curious.
Malhotra shrugged, unbothered by the question. "Because a book that does well makes me look good to the people I sell paper and plates to for the next one. And because," he added, glancing at Raghav, "it's not every day a thirteen-year-old walks in here arguing print economics better than half my actual clients."
Raghav's father laughed at that too, properly this time, and something in the shape of the negotiation settled — not quite a friendship yet, but the early architecture of one.
---
They signed the contract two days later, on the twenty-third, for five thousand copies at a final price just over eleven thousand dollars, production estimated at two weeks.
His sister, who had appointed herself official inspector of the entire proceedings, watched the presses through the glass partition with enormous, serious eyes.
"They make dinosaur?" she asked Malhotra directly, as though he alone could be trusted with the answer.
"They certainly will," he told her, entirely serious in return, and she seemed satisfied enough with that to let the matter drop.
Raghav stood at the glass a moment longer than the rest of his family. Behind it, a technician lifted the first aluminum printing plate onto the press, unhurried, the way you handle something you've done ten thousand times before and still respect.
It wasn't ink on paper yet. It wasn't even a book. But for the first time, it no longer belonged only to him.
The manuscript itself — actual pages, his mother's pencil marks, his father's careful science notes, the whole messy history of the last month — had already been carried into the back to be typeset, out of his hands now in a way nothing about the story had ever been before.
Writing it, he thought, watching the machinery hum through the glass, had taken imagination. Everything before this moment had happened entirely inside his own control — his memory, his notebook, his family's kitchen table.
This part required something else. Trust, mostly. Trust that Malhotra's presses would do their job, that the paper wouldn't yellow, that somewhere out past this shop, in bookstores he'd never seen, strangers who owed him nothing might actually pick the thing up.
Raghav watched the machine come alive with its slow, metallic rhythm, and then turned toward the door with his family beside him.
The story had finally left his hands.
_____
THANKS FOR READING.....
Author's Note
Thank you so much for reading this novel. Your support means more than I can express.
A few years ago, I wrote another novel titled Swallowing the Cosmos. It remains one of the stories closest to my heart.
I'm excited to share that I've now brought its first chapter to life as a manga and an anime using AI-assisted tools. It has been an incredible experience seeing the story evolve into a visual format.
If you'd like to check it out, you can find it on Instagram at @the.last.dawn.of.india