It is forty-five degrees of laziness and desertion outside. Everything is bathed in yellow and melting in the sunlight. No one can feel what the laborer sweating in this heat can feel. No one can even pretend to sympathize, no words can attempt to capture their toil adequately. It is very comfortable inside the car where people of words are sitting. The air-conditioner is working with a slight hum.

He does not have to look at his wife to know that she is crying. There is a usual comfortable silence.

“You don’t care at all, do you?” she slowly speaks at last.

“About what?” he inquires politely, still looking at the road.

“About all this, about me,” she replies after a pause, not finding any words that would eloquently describe the situation.

“I do. Of course,” he replies, still very politely.

“Do you not love me at all?” she inquires, trying to get him to speak beyond monosyllables.

“Of course I do. You cannot doubt that,” he says turning towards her a little.

“Sometimes,” she replies, pauses, then continues, “but I love you all the time. Why can’t you do that?”

“I love you all the time too, whatever you mean by that. But I can only feel it sometimes. Is that so bad?”

“No, I guess it’s not,” she says, staring at the deserted yellow road. “But it is, can’t you see what it’s doing to me?”

“I can. And I can’t understand why. I just think life is bigger than that, than loving all the time,” he says, a little irritated, a little helpless.

A fresh bout of tears rises. She is determined not to let them fall. The effort chokes her, she coughs violently. He removes his left hand from the gear and pats her gently on the back. The cough subsides, the tears become silent, still falling.

“I don’t know where we go wrong,” he says helplessly. “It makes me sad to see you like this.”

She takes a few moments before she can reply through a tear-soaked voice, “I have my doubts about it sometimes. If you felt anything, you would do something about it.”

“What do you suggest I do? Do I not take care of you well enough? Do I not provide for you everything you desire? Tell me one thing I haven’t done for you since…” his voice starts to rise. He knows it’s not the right time so he stops mid-sentence before it hurts her more.

“You haven’t loved me the way I wanted you to. You don’t talk to me,” she says, staring blankly at the windscreen.

“I did not know talking was a part of loving you. I love you in the way I know, the way I love.”

“Which is?”

A reply forms in his mind but he knows it’s not the right one. ‘How does he love her?’ he thinks hard for an appropriate answer. But what is an appropriate answer for that? Is there ever an appropriate answer to loving someone. He knows what she will say if he asks her the same thing. “I love you with everything I have, heart, body and soul.” He could say that to her, but it wouldn’t be true. He knows she loves him with all she has, which is why she is suffering the way she is today. But he can’t, he needs to reserve a portion of himself for his own family, for his work, for the world outside and the matters that need to be taken care of on a daily basis. He can’t love like her. But how does he love then?

The silence is misleading; it gives birth to so many unwanted thoughts.

“Have you ever considered divorce?” she suggests, expecting an outburst that usually follows such an unconventional idea.

“I have,” he says calmly and truthfully. He has thought of that as an option to end her misery, “but that is not possible.”

“Because…?” she asks, half-glad to know he has not considered it seriously.

“Because we love each other and it makes no sense at all to get a divorce when there is so much love.”

“Then?” she takes up the monosyllable end now.

“Then even if we are miserable, we will be miserable together.”

“That’s the most impassioned speech I’ve gotten out of you in months,” she smiles a little.

“It’s not impassioned,” he says with a stiff neck, “it just makes sense.”

“Do you know you’re emotionally dead?” she says, quite serious for such a cliche statement.

“No, I’m only emotionally divested,” he replies.

The world outside cannot imagine the pain these people of words go through. So they suffice with complaining about the heat and toil outside, while we suffice with translating our internal toils into useless words.