He was alone when he entered the drawing room. Then he left his apartment and was no longer lone. At least that’s what he thought that day when he had just experienced the luxury of not hearing his wife’s otherwise daily earbash. She was asleep in the bedroom dreaming of something with an eventual horrid climax. But neither did she or he know what it would be.
He was a mentor to all his 72 students, but he was just a feckless, good-for-nothing professor to his wife. “My students, my theses, my papers, my my my, everything my. MY MY MY; do you even know that you have a wife?” she would start everyday. “I blame my parents for this marriage; not good in social circles, not good in bed, such a boring person,” she would nag him day & night. He would listen silently, without uttering a single word.
Dr. Hari entered the university campus and took the stairs. Through the staff room he walked towards his assigned classroom. He could hear a husky voice coming through the only class in the long corridor. He puckered his brow and paced faster and finally reached a point from where he could glance through the transparent windows. His pace reduced to zero as the figure on the dais grinned at him from the classroom. The class was an example of pure attention.
He started walking, with growing dread. The figure continued his lecture. He didn’t know why but the scene reminded him of his wife’s nagging. Somewhere, he thought, something had to do with his wife’s wants. Because the style in which the figure was lecturing was totally opposite to what Dr. Hari employed. In his 17 years as a pedagogical maverick, he had never stepped on the dais. He would sit with the students, never using the writing board either. The problem was, the figure looked like him, portrayed in his wife’s words. Unable to fathom the scene, he turned left, to his students. What he saw would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Blood oozing out of their mouths, the students sat in impeccable reverence, dead.
Two hours later, he woke up inside his assigned classroom. He lay at the floor, his students and two assistants surrounding him. His second expression after waking up was a smile. He was the head professor of Psychology.
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