CHAPTER 17 — THE WORLD GETS BIGGER
Three weeks had changed the shape of the mornings.
There were fewer calls Raghav had to make now, and more that simply came in without him dialing anything. Envelopes arrived with company names he didn't recognize, and his mother had started leaving them beside his plate at breakfast without asking which ones mattered, because there was no longer any reliable way to tell just by looking.
One of those envelopes was open in front of him now. It was early July, a little over three weeks since he'd opened the new position in Halloway's office, and the statement inside had a number on it he had to read twice.
265,000 copies.
Five thousand had once sounded like an absurd number to bet on. Now five thousand was barely visible inside the total. He ran his finger under the figure once, then pulled the previous statement out from underneath it, not because he thought either number was wrong, but because he wanted to see roughly where the jump had actually happened.
---
But the number wasn't the strangest thing on the statement. The strangest thing was what the columns next to it said. It used to be store names — twenty copies here, fifteen there, a store owner calling Malhotra directly to ask for more. Now the reports came from distributors, and the quantities beside their names weren't in the dozens anymore. A western distributor. A midwest one. Another on the east coast, each one moving thousands of copies at a time, without Raghav ever having spoken to a single person at any of them.
He wasn't selling books to individual stores one at a time anymore. Somewhere in the last month, other people had started doing that part for him.
The names had changed. So had the price sitting beside them. The roughly two hundred and thirty thousand copies that had gone out since the third batch — the twenty thousand he'd already accounted for back in Chapter 16 — weren't moving at $7.25. Distributors bought in volume, and volume meant a lower price: $5.25 a copy, on average, once he worked through the different agreements.
Two hundred thirty thousand times $5.25 came to $1,207,500.
He didn't write that down as profit. It was gross sales, and there was a difference — the distributors took their own cut, there were shipping and handling costs on their end, and none of that reached him directly. When he checked the payment schedule attached to the statement, only about $600,000 of that figure had actually come in so far. The rest was still owed, arriving in pieces as each distributor's own invoices came due. A million dollars in sales wasn't the same thing as a million dollars in his account, and he'd learned that distinction properly now, the same way he learned most things — by nearly getting something wrong once and never quite forgetting it after that.
The lower price explained why the quantities were so large. Less money per copy, vastly more copies moved than Malhotra's original network could ever have managed on its own — distributors took care of the reordering, the shipping, the chasing, all the operational weight that used to sit entirely on him. He understood the trade well enough that it hadn't taken him more than an evening to decide it was worth making.
The addresses on the statement explained something else. Copies were going to states Malhotra had never touched. Then, further down the page, a distributor listed with a Canadian address.
"Canada?" his mother asked, glancing over his shoulder on her way past with a stack of folded laundry.
"Apparently."
"When did that happen?"
"While we weren't looking, as far as I can tell."
She studied the page for a second, the specific look she gave anything that had grown past the point she'd last checked on it. "You should probably start keeping track of this properly."
"I am."
"I meant the countries."
She didn't wait for an answer, just kept moving toward the hallway with the laundry, and Raghav noticed, not for the first time, that she'd started recognizing distributor names in the mail before he did — not because she understood the publishing business any better than he did, but because she was usually the one who opened the envelopes first.
Behind the Canadian order sat a handful of letters that weren't orders at all, just inquiries — a distributor in the UK, one in Australia, a couple of smaller outfits in Europe asking about wholesale terms for the English-language edition. Nothing enormous yet. Just the first channels of something that hadn't existed a month ago, quietly opening.
---
His sister found him still sitting there an hour later and planted herself in the chair across the table without asking.
"Are you using this?"
"Yes."
"For how long?"
"I don't know yet."
"Then I'm using it too." She set her coloring book down on top of a stack of distributor statements before he could stop her.
"Don't put anything on those."
"I won't." She uncapped a crayon and set it directly on the corner of the UK letter.
He moved the crayon. She didn't seem to notice, already absorbed in something on her own page, and Raghav sat there for a second longer than the moment strictly required, looking at a stack of paper worth more money than either of them had ever seen, next to a few-year-old kid who'd already lost interest in all of it in favor of a picture of what appeared to be a dinosaur wearing a hat.
---
He finished with the distributor statements eventually and closed the folder. Underneath it sat the other ledger, the one he'd been carrying alongside the book numbers since May. The publishing figures had grown almost too fast to properly track. The yen numbers had been moving the opposite way — quietly, steadily, waiting for him to decide when enough was enough.
He opened to the page marked June 15. Entry: ¥149.50. Then he checked the current rate.
¥138.
That was the number he'd been positioned for.
The first time he'd closed a position like this, almost a month ago on 15th of June, he'd spent most of the morning checking figures twice and asking Halloway to repeat things before he trusted any of it. This time he already knew exactly what he wanted before he picked up the phone.
"Close it," he said. "All of it."
"At one thirty-eight?"
"At whatever it settles at from here. Close it."
It took the rest of the day to fully unwind — futures first, then the forwards, then the options, the same order as before, each piece confirmed on its own before he added anything together.
The confirmation came through late that afternoon. Two hundred thousand dollars of capital had turned into six hundred twenty thousand in gross proceeds. After taxes, commissions, and the other costs of unwinding a position that size, net proceeds came to roughly five hundred fifty thousand dollars. Profit alone, once everything settled, was close to four hundred twenty thousand.
Raghav looked at the confirmation for a few seconds. He'd had fifty thousand dollars when all of this started, back in an apartment three weeks off a plane, arguing with his mother about whether he was even allowed to try. One trade had just produced more than ten times that, on top of everything it had already returned the first time around. He set the confirmation down beside the distributor statements, the two stacks of paper sitting next to each other on the table like they belonged to the same story, because by now they did.
---
Somewhere over the following days, he noticed that people had stopped calling it the dinosaur book.
At first, people had needed something to identify it by — the cover, the dinosaur, the fact that a thirteen-year-old had written it. A distributor mentioned that bookstores were asking for it by name now instead of by description. Someone described it, in a letter Malhotra forwarded along, as "the novel by the thirteen-year-old" rather than the dinosaur book. And once, in a note attached to the Canadian order, somebody had simply written his full name, like that was just what it was called now.
*Raghav Sharma's book.*
It was a small change in wording, but he understood what it meant. The book no longer needed an explanation before someone knew what they were asking for.
---
The call came on an ordinary afternoon, while Raghav was still working through a stack of correspondence that had nothing unusual about it. His mother answered, the way she answered most calls now that nobody kept careful track of whose turn it was anymore.
"Hello?" A pause, longer than a distributor call usually needed. She covered the receiver and looked over at him. "It's someone from television."
"What station?"
"I don't know. She just said television."
He took the phone. The woman introduced herself, said she worked for The Oprah Winfrey Show, and told him they'd heard about the book — the age, the sales, how fast it had moved from a handful of bookstores to distributors in two countries.
"Why," Raghav asked, before she'd finished explaining what they wanted.
That seemed to catch her slightly off guard. "Why what?"
"Why me. There are other books. Why call about this one."
"Because it's not really about the book alone. It's a thirteen-year-old who wrote something this size and turned it into a real publishing success. That's the part people want to hear about."
"What would the segment actually cover? The book, or me?"
"Both, probably. Mostly you, honestly."
"How long would it run?"
"We'd need to work that out. Depends on how the segment's structured."
"When are you thinking?"
"Soon, if you're interested. A few weeks, maybe less."
He told her he'd need to talk to his parents and asked for a number to call back on. She gave it to him. He wrote it down next to that afternoon's yen figures, which struck him, for a second, as a strange place for a television producer's number to end up.
---
After he hung up, he sat there a while without going back to the correspondence.
The desk hadn't changed. Same ledger, same stack of statements, the same ordinary afternoon light through the window. But the numbers sitting on it had nothing in common with where they'd started. Two hundred sixty-five thousand copies. Over a million dollars in newer sales alone, part of it already in the bank, the rest still arriving. Five hundred fifty thousand net from a currency trade he'd once had to talk his own mother into letting him attempt with twenty thousand dollars. Distributors in places he'd never been. A phone number for a television show sitting in the same notebook as an exchange rate.
Three weeks earlier, the entire problem had been how to make anyone notice the book at all. Now the problem, if it was even still a problem, was that people already had.
He picked up the next distributor statement and kept reading.
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