My professor’s neckties hypnotize me. Some of you might like to call them ‘absurd’ for they’re very richly painted in colors too bright and patterns too strange that one gets lost in the weird tapered world. Trees, snowflakes, flowers, worms all splattered together in a mysterious cocktail. And while i am totally fine with his other equally eccentric neckties (except they make me think he is a Martian), i do take offence when he wears this floral one. And it’s not just about those brightly colored martian flowers curling and snaking all over either. There is an old-fashioned wooden ladder too that starts from the bottom and spirals up to his Windsor knot with all kinds of slimy worms hanging from its every nook and cranny. And the fact that he wears them in autumn makes his neckties look more like blooming off-season creepers which would soon wrap around his wrinkly neck and choke him to death. His withering hair look like waves in a tempest and you can’t stop theorizing how his space-ship might have abandoned him after a secret surveillance mission on Earth.

When he threatens, his necktie swings ominously like a pendulum as he says “No cross talks or i’ll switch into another role. And you won’t like it, i am sure you won’t.” And then comes my favorite: “If you be nice to me, i’ll be nice to you and if you trick me, i am Satan.”

Every time he says that, his deep voice trembles and for a tiny moment, a fraction of a second so small that one wonders if that was just a figment of one’s imagination, his eyes blaze, a wild flame gushes forth and blows out in eternal oblivion and what always follows is a long pin-drop silence and the reverberation, “I am Satan.”

He has a knack of talking in a tone that nobody can understand. He speaks fine English though, is very audible and prepares his lectures quite well but he can still appear like calling out from the other side of our world, in a long forgotten language, in a tone that’s so typically martian but strangely soothing to put the whole class to sleep. And once that happens,