बुद्धिजीवी

Summary

The text presents a detailed, observational narrative about a man described as an unusual intellectual and idealist, observed daily between noon and one on a path. The narrator instructs the reader to watch him closely without being noticed, emphasizing that he carries an invisible burden, like countless souls he can neither bear nor set down. The man is seen interacting with his environment in a peculiar, seemingly unmotivated manner: he plucks a mango leaf, caresses it, and eats it; he sits by a tree, smiling inexplicably. He is surrounded by cows and buffaloes but appears to be looking at himself rather than them. The narrator recounts a conversation where the man explains that a person’s deepest loneliness can only be shared with an animal, not another human, because an animal does not impose expectations or threaten one’s consciousness. The man is a teacher at the same rural school as the narrator and lives next door, though they rarely visit each other. The narrator describes his erratic walking style, suggesting he has no single personality but contains multiple persons within him. He once worked at St. Xavier’s College but left, claiming he was bored and disgusted with the artificial, secure life of a professor, preferring the village despite calling it another kind of hell. The narrator admits to feeling a strange fear of the man’s laughter and an inability to approach him, as if a magical line prevented it. The man later visits the narrator after months and tells a story about a close friend who married disastrously, leading the narrator to advise the friend’s wife to seek divorce because the friend could not live without a woman while she could. A year after the divorce, the friend writes that he has abandoned plans to remarry, realizing that true life begins only by rising above personal expectations.