新SAT阅读亚太首考第一篇文章原文及各种背景知识分享

北京sat培训,sat备考资料,sat网课,sat培训机构,sat保分班,sat真题

1. 上原文

Nawabdin Electrician

The life of a wily Pakistani electrician

BY DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN

Another man might have thrown up his hands-but not Nawabdin. The daughters

acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with satisfaction in the mirror

each morning at the face of a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course

knew that he must proliferate his sources of revenue-the salary he received from

K. K. Harouni for tending the tube wells would not even begin to suffice. He set

up a one-room flour mill, run off a condemned electric motor-condemned by him.

He tried his hand at fish-farming in a pond at the edge of one of his master's

fields. He bought broken radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not demur

even when asked to fix watches, although that enterprise did spectacularly

badly, and earned him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took apart ever

kept time again.

K. K. Harouni lived mostly in Lahore and rarely visited his farms. Whenever

the old man did visit, Nawab would place himself night and day at the door

leading from the servants' sitting area into the walled grove of ancient banyan

trees where the old farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator glasses bent

and smudged, Nawab tended the household machinery, the air-conditioners, water

heaters, refrigerators, and pumps, like an engineer tending the boilers on a

foundering steamer in an Atlantic gale. By his superhuman efforts, he almost

managed to maintain K. K. Harouni in the same mechanical cocoon, cooled and

bathed and lighted and fed, that the landowner enjoyed in Lahore.

Harouni, of course, became familiar with this ubiquitous man, who not only

accompanied him on his tours of inspection but could be found morning and night

standing on the master bed rewiring the light fixture or poking at the water

heater in the bathroom. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the

psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say a word. The landowner, who was

cheerfully filing his nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him to

go ahead.

"Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to the Indus, and on these

lands are fully seventeen tube wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells

there is but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have earned these gray

hairs"-here he bowed his head to show the gray-"and now I cannot fulfill my

duties as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive me my weakness.

Better a darkened house and proud hunger within than disgrace in the light of

day. Release me, I ask you, I beg you."

The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of speeches, though not usually

this florid, filed away at his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.

"What's the matter, Nawabdin?"

"Matter, sir? Oh, what could be the matter in your service? I've eaten your

salt for all my years. But, sir, on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with

the many injuries I've received when heavy machinery fell on me-I cannot any

longer bicycle about like a bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I

first had the good fortune to enter your service. I beg you, sir, let me

go."

"And what is the solution?" Harouni asked, seeing that they had come to the

crux. He didn't particularly care one way or the other, except that it touched

on his comfort-a matter of great interest to him.

"Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could somehow limp along, at least

until I train up some younger man."

The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt expansive in front of the

fire, and so, much to the disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a

brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even managed to extract an allowance for

gasoline.

The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began

calling him Uncle and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew

absolutely nothing. He could now range farther, doing much wider business. Best

of all, now he could spend every night with his wife, who early in the marriage

had begged to live not in Nawab's quarters in the village but with her family in

Firoza, near the only girls' school in the area. A long straight road ran from

the canal headworks near Firoza all the way to the Indus, through the heart of

the K. K. Harouni lands. The road ran on the bed of an old highway built when

these lands lay within a princely state. Some hundred and fifty years ago, one

of the princes had ridden that way, going to a wedding or a funeral in this

remote district, felt hot, and ordered that rosewood trees be planted to shade

the passersby. Within a few hours, he forgot that he had given the order, and in

a few dozen years he in turn was forgotten, but these trees still stood,

enormous now, some of them dead and looming without bark, white and leafless.

Nawab would fly down this road on his new machine, with bags and streamers

hanging from every knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump, seemed

to be flapping numerous small vestigial wings; and with his grinning face, as he

rolled up to whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears almost blown

off, he shone with the speed of his arrival.