SAT Reading Practice Test 6

This passage is adapted from Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician.” ©2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin.


Another man might have thrown up his
hands—but not Nawabdin. His twelve daughters
acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with
satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of
5 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 little one-room flour mill, run off
10 a condemned electric motor—condemned by him.
He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at
the edge of his master’s fields. He bought broken
radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not
demur even when asked to fix watches, though that
15 enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned
him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took
apart ever kept time again.
K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived
mostly in Lahore. Whenever the old man visited,
20 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
25 household machinery, the air conditioners, water
heaters, refrigerators, and water 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
30 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
35 his tours of inspection, but morning and night could
be found standing on the master bed rewiring the
light fixture or in the bathroom poking at the water
heater. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the
psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say
40 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
45 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
50 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
55 his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.
“What’s the matter, Nawabdin?”
“Matter, sir? O 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
60 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 employment.
I beg you, sir, let me go.”
65 “And what’s the solution?” asked Harouni, 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
70 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
75 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
80 knew absolutely nothing. He could now range
further, doing a much wider business. Best of all,
now he could spend every night with his wife, who
had begged to live not on the farm but near her
family in Firoza, where also they could educate at
85 least the two eldest daughters. 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. Nawab would fly down this road on his new
machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every
90 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
95 arrival.