When his business was over, he was arguing with himself whether he should buy his wife a beautiful, expensive gift, or just tell her that he had wanted to buy something most beautiful and expensive, but that there was nothing available. In that way he could buy her something very cheap and inexpensive.
Then he thought that perhaps if he sent a telegram she would be very happy. If he called on the phone, she would cry and tell him all unhappy stories. It would be a long telephone conversation, and very expensive. The best thing would be to send a telegram. In a few words he would say everything.
So he went to the telegram office and told the clerk how to word the telegram: “Tomorrow I shall leave New Mexico for New York on the 9:00 flight and arrive at 3:30.” Then he said, “I love you, John.”
The clerk counted the words and said, “It will cost ten dollars.”
He said, “Ten dollars? I can’t afford to spend ten dollars for a telegram. Please take out some words. The message should be the same — that I am leaving at such a time — so that she will be able to meet me at the airport. But ‘I love you’ is unimportant, redundant. She knows that I love her. The best thing is to omit the phrase ‘I love you’.”
The clerk was a woman. She said, “The most important thing in the telegram you will omit? For a wife to get a short message — ‘I love you’ — from her husband is like Heaven. How can you omit that? No, you have to keep it. You can omit anything else.”
The man said, “The message I have to keep. All right, put the message first and then put ‘love’ and sign it. ‘I’ and ‘you’ we can omit. It is not necessary to say ‘I love you’.”
The clerk said, “It is no good if you say only ‘love’.”
The man said, “‘I’ and ‘you’ are understood.”
Several customers overheard the conversation. Some of the men took the man’s side. One of them said, “O God, what my wife does to me! How could I even think of writing that kind of thing? Never!”
The businessman said to the clerk, “Even now it is more than I want to spend.”
The clerk said, “You are such a useless husband. I shall pay for the word ‘love’.” She took out some money from her wallet and said, “I am a woman and a wife. I know if I didn’t get the message ‘I love you’ from my husband, I would feel miserable. The best thing is for me to pay for ‘I love you’.”
A colleague of hers, another woman, overheard the conversation and came over. She said, “To hear from my husband, ‘I love you’, is not enough. For me, he has to add that he misses me very much.”
The man said, “Yes, at my expense.”
Another man listening again took his side: “Women only know how to spend our money.”
The colleague said, “No, I shall pay for ‘I miss you very much’. You have to feel the heart of a woman. You husbands are so callous, so stone-hearted. You have no heart for your wives.” So the second one paid for “I miss you very much.” This is how the telegram was sent.
When the wife met the husband at the airport, she was so happy. She thanked her husband for sending her such a long telegram with such sweet words.
The husband said, “You see, I always tell you that I love you and miss you. You don’t believe me, but my telegram is the proof. I wanted to buy something very, very expensive, but that hopeless place I was in didn’t have anything expensive. So I bought you a beautiful mirror, because I always see in you a beautiful goddess. Now you can always look at the mirror and appreciate your beauty. That will give you joy.”From:Sri Chinmoy,The mushroom and the umbrella, Agni Press, 1981
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/mu