"Wil McCarthy - The Technetium Rush" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

it, and we can suppose the brief local fame brought on by its discovery had some
impact on his later thinking. The papers called him a “Joshi Bhopal staff geologist,”
and he liked the sound of that.

Anyway, while he was hardly a rich man, Solanki’s salary was enough to rent
not only a small apartment in Jaipur, but also an office in which he slowly built a
modest but respectable soil and mineral identification lab, whose services he
advertised in the same papers who’d reported his copper find. Business was not
exactly booming, but he collected enough odd jobs to build a résumé, and in his
spare time, through a combination of personal fieldwork and bargain hunting in the
city shops, amassed a rock collection large and photogenic enough to pose in front
of. He’d be ready for the newspapers—or TV, or internet bloggers—the next time
they showed up.

So things were going well, and it seems natural enough that Vyas and Solanki,
lovers now for two and a half years, should tie the knot and move in together, which
is exactly what they did. The ceremony was small, brief, and sparsely reported, and
though the newlyweds expressed a desire to travel overseas, in fact the honeymoon
was a week in Alibag (near Mumbai), paid for by Solanki’s parents and lightly
subsidized by Vyas’ widowed mother. Affectionate and outgoing in public, the two
were in many ways the perfect couple, to the relief of both families and the mild envy
of their friends.

But real life hides clouds behind its silver linings, and within that cramped
apartment our lovebirds were not quite as happy as they seemed. The affections of a
good woman had mellowed Solanki’s wandering ways, but the reverse cannot be
said for the bride herself, whose weekend gambling was now fueled by a
substantially higher income. Once a quirky affectation, the betting now assumed the
proportions of a full-blown addiction, for which (at Solanki’s insistence) she several
times sought counseling. But Vyas, now Abha Solanki, either couldn’t or wouldn’t
mend her ways, and by the end of 2003 she had managed not only to spend most of
their combined income, plus her dowry and Rocky’s nest egg, but to accumulate
(by some accounts) up to a quarter-million rupees in debt, to unsavory characters in
whom sympathy was not a notable trait.

“I’m trapped,” Rakesh told a friend that winter. “I can’t afford the pills to
keep her in at night, and without them we come home poorer every week.”

To which the friend claims to have replied, “Smart guy like you, Rocky, ought
to imagine a way out. Think of a monkey stealing oranges through a fence, eh? He
can’t pull his hand out, or he thinks he can’t, because he won’t let go of the orange.”

“But I like my orange,” said Rocky. “I adore my orange.”

“Well, then,” said the friend. “Only one thing for it: You’ve got to scale the
fence.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you’re the smart one, and I’m hungry. Let’s eat, eh? And then let’s