He was gazing around his house with a depressed look. He had a tea-cup and a saucer in his hands, the contents of which had become cold whilst waiting to be consumed. There was a fair amount of the dusk light filtering through the worn out and sieve-like curtains covering the only window the house had.

His beard was over-grown, his shirt dirty and wrinkled, his hair shabby and his brown shoes worn down at the sole with the left one exposing the inner part of the shoe as well. He was sitting on a weak-looking, thin cane-wood chair, with a single cushion to support his back. He had his left leg crossed over his right knee, with his right foot resting peacefully on the red carpet beneath. He looked troubled.

His was a single room house, and as you would enter, you could find the chair he sat on on the right side in front of the window that opened up to the front of the house, a small kitchen like setup behind the chair, with the stove resting on the floor, and its back towards the right wall. Then, on the left were a couple of mattresses that lay there, perhaps to give him, his wife and their only son a good night’s sleep after every hard day they would go through.

His wife was combing their son’s hair, as the son sat cross-legged on a mattress. She looked up at he husband, finding him gazing around the house in search of the satisfaction one would draw from having built a good lifestyle for his family. He found none, as he then looked out the window with a dejected whine, a whimper that is passed on the outside when the heart cries loud inside!

“Are you not going to go to work today? Your customers would be waiting to see those red and green apples that you sell them with that bright smile on your face!”, she said in an attempt of changing the mood.

The man’s gaze returned from infinity to the finite of his house, he turned his head towards his lady, looked her in the eye, and said, ” No one requires them any more. They say the apples are bad, and that I am a corrupt shopkeeper. I am not able to smile any more when I sell, because I know that I am not right in selling these apples to them. They are a stale lot I have left, and I have no money left to buy new ones from the retailers. These apples are all we have left to eat for ourselves as well now.”

Her hands stopped to move, and her son looked up at her as if he was denied service to his most pleasurable activity, only to find a tear trickle down her eye and drop onto his forehead. The son knew it was time that he should go out of the house, and let the parents feel more comfortable. He never liked seeing his father dejected and his mother crying in response to that dejection. His father had always promised a bright future for him, and had always made him feel that things were fine and the family was doing well. But these were times when the understanding, the realization of the imminent bankruptcy was obvious. He slowly got up and went out the front door, only to sit against the front wall, hiding beneath the window, letting that rare tear out his eye.

“I had loved you for your goodness, respected you for your honesty, and hence I had always warned you of the consequences beforehand when you took that decision last year”, she said with a trembling and shaky voice. Her man could do nothing but look away from her in shame, head down, and eyes closed.

“People were buying limited amounts from me, and although we were in profits, there was no increment in our monthly earnings. So, i thought that mixing two different qualities of apples and selling them at the previous rate would not be a bad idea. And slowly, I felt, that people will come to like the lesser apples as well, and then I could sell them alone at the same hight price I already had, without having to invest in the supreme quality ones I used to sell. I was not morally wrong, was I ? But, it was a bad business decision. And, I thought that I would make my son leave the town to pursue his career with the money we’d make.” With these words he started crying, moaning from within, stifled on the outside due to the presence of his family.

I could not bear being in that house any longer, and I left.

Their son was still sitting there, knees up, arms resting on them, and his head buried in them.

May God bless this family with enough material wealth that they start to look beyond soon!

I wasn’t crying though.

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