The worn out lines of the wooden table looked back at him as he sat warming his numb hands on a half empty glass of tea. He had driven as far out as he could from the city, and then turned off into the dark, losing track of time and direction, till he found this particular tea shop in the middle of nowhere. The owner and his wife were in the middle of an argument in a language he didn�t understand and a small girl sat at the back, her skin and her dress merging into the shadows, rocking and reading gently aloud from a book. He thought he heard a voice echo like someone announcing the departure of a train from a station. Surprised, he looked around. Then he realized it was the doctor�s voice still ringing in his head. He wiped at his oily forehead and sipped at the hot, sweet, milky tea.
His life was one that was easy to envy, and many envied him too. He was looked up to for wisdom and prudence, and he was talked about for his gentleness and his compassion. He spoke kindly to everyone and people around him believed his life was as harmonious as one could wish for. Yet he knew how easy it was to both understand and misunderstand a language one did not know. The agitated voices in the shop distracted him for a moment. The shopkeeper�s wife was obviously calling the shopkeeper lazy, while he was denying it violently, pointing to various parts of the shop to show all the work that he did while she -- now he was pointing out at the darkness -- was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was talking about her affair with another man. He smiled at the acrobatics that his mind was doing and told himself that, for all he knew, they were discussing who to vote for. Or more likely, where the next day�s expenses would come from.
There are truths that go to the grave with a person. And there are truths that can only be revealed after a person goes to the grave. It worried him that the doctor might actually not have told him all that was there to be told. Strangely, this thought led him to think of the many women he had desired in his youth but who had not felt that he was the one they wanted to spend their life with. In his mind, they had died, and each of their husbands, or fathers, or sisters, or sons, came to see him, to tell him, hesitantly, one by one, that it was he, and only he, that she had truly longed to be with. The shopkeeper and his wife stopped their discussion abruptly as they looked in his direction to see what he was chuckling about. When they resumed their argument, he was as certain as one can be that it no longer was one.
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