Ravi's repair shop smelled of solder and cardamom. Priya worked there on Saturdays, sorting screws and writing receipts in a notebook her uncle refused to replace with a computer. The shop had been busy when she was small; now the window was full of things people had abandoned: a radio, two lamps, and a toaster with a bent lever. Ravi repaired each one, then waited. The waiting was the problem. A new toaster cost less than an hour of his time.
拉维的修理铺闻起来有焊锡和小豆蔻的味道。普里娅星期六在这里帮忙，分拣螺丝，用一本叔叔死活不肯换成电脑的笔记本开收据。她小时候铺子很忙；如今橱窗里堆满了人们丢下的东西：一台收音机、两盏灯，还有一只把手柄掰弯的烤面包机。拉维把它们一一修好，然后等待。等待才是问题所在。买一只新烤面包机的钱，还不到他一小时的工钱。
Mr. Lowe brought in a kettle that clicked off too early. Ravi quoted the price, and Mr. Lowe's face changed. “I can buy a new one for that,” he said, not unkindly. Priya watched him leave and did the arithmetic in the notebook: the kettle's cost, the shop's rent, the hours her uncle had spent learning to fix things designed to be thrown away. The numbers did not balance. They had not balanced for years.
洛先生拿来一只过早跳闸的水壶。拉维报了价，洛先生的表情变了。“这点钱我都能买个新的了，”他说，语气并不刻薄。普里娅看着他离开，在笔记本上算了一笔账：水壶的成本、铺子的租金、叔叔为学会修理这些“设计好被丢掉”的东西所花的那些小时。数字对不上。它们已经很多年对不上了。
For a school project, Priya counted what the town discarded in one week. She found fourteen kettles, nine toasters, and a mountain of plastic that would outlast her grandchildren. Most had been bought within two years. She took three toasters apart on the shop floor and discovered why: a tiny fuse soldered into the heating element, impossible to replace without special tools, designed so that the whole machine would fail at once.
为了一个学校课题，普里娅统计了全镇一周内丢弃的东西。她找到十四只水壶、九只烤面包机，还有一座比她孙辈活得还久的塑料山。大多数都是两年内买的。她在店堂里拆开三只烤面包机，发现了原因：一枚小小的保险丝被焊在加热元件里，没有专用工具根本无法更换，设计上就是要让整台机器一次报废。
She wrote a report, but reports do not pay rent. So she started a repair café in the shop's back room: one Saturday a month, people brought broken things, and volunteers taught them how to open, clean, and mend. Ravi was doubtful. “Nobody wants to learn,” he said, on a morning when six people were already waiting outside. Priya put him at the front table with a screwdriver and a stool, and by noon he was explaining, to a queue, why a stitch in time saves nine.
她写了一份报告，可报告付不了房租。于是她在铺子后间办起“修理咖啡屋”：每月一个星期六，人们带来坏掉的东西，志愿者教他们如何打开、清洁和修补。拉维有些怀疑。“没人想学，”他说——而那天早上，已经有六个人在外面等着了。普里娅把他安排在靠前的桌子旁，给他一把螺丝刀和一张凳子；到中午，他已经在向排队的顾客解释，为什么“小洞不补，大洞吃苦”。
The repair café did not make the shop rich. It made it necessary. People came for a fuse and stayed for advice; a school asked Ravi to teach a unit on materials; the council sent a broken bench from the park. BrightBuy, the discount shop on the corner, sent its manager with a lamp that had failed in the window. He expected a joke. Ravi fixed it in ten minutes, refused payment, and handed him a card for the Saturday sessions.
修理咖啡屋没有让铺子变富，却让它变得不可缺少。人们来换一枚保险丝，留下来听建议；一所学校请拉维去讲“材料”单元；市政会把公园里一条坏掉的长椅送来。街角的折扣店“亮买”派经理送来一盏在橱窗里坏掉的灯。他本以为会遭到嘲笑。拉维十分钟就修好了，不收钱，还递给他一张星期六活动的卡片。
In September, Priya added a column to the notebook: not price, but years. A repaired kettle might last three more; a cheap one, fourteen months. The shop began offering a yearly check-up for the price of two coffees, and enough people signed up to cover the rent. Her uncle still wrote receipts by hand. Above the bench he hung the first toaster with its bent lever, and beneath it a label Priya had printed: “It was never worthless. It was only unwanted.”
九月，普里娅在笔记本上添了一栏：不写价格，写年数。修好的水壶也许还能用三年；便宜的，十四个月。铺子开始提供每年一次的检修，价格等于两杯咖啡，报名的人足够付房租了。叔叔仍旧手写收据。他在工作台上方挂起第一只弯了手柄的烤面包机，下面是一张普里娅打印的标签：“它从来不是毫无价值，它只是被当成不想要了。”