Mitra shifted her countenance back to iciness as she affirmed to her captor, "I choose to differ. I remember things far too intensely."
"Then you must be remembering your own sins as well." The voice was mocking this time.
Mitra seemed a little plagued by her own thoughts as she struggled to keep her face straight. Finally, she uttered in a low, heavy tone, "You have no idea."
The mockery of the man in the background was much more evident this time as he said, "You know, it is quite interesting that the public outside is fighting the police, the system, to rescue you, to find me and hang me to death. Would they do the same if they get to know what kind of a hypocrite you really are?"
Mitra jeered at her captor. "A hypocrite? Me? How in the whole world did I suddenly become the bad person here?"
The voice, raw and gruff, announced, "Because you wouldn't hesitate to kill a person, and yet you preach what is right through your public broadcasts of offences people commit around you."
Mitra's eyes wavered with a certain wariness as she asked, "What do you mean?"
The man answered, "You tried to kill me the night I kidnapped you."
Mitra seemed guarded as she said, "I defended myself and tried to capture you, so I could drag you to the police station and get you prosecuted for your crimes."
The man's laughter broke through the frames of the video, horrifying and frosty. He paused to say, "Please Mitra, if you had a knife there with you, you would have stabbed me over and over."
Mitra seemed to be choosing what to say. After a moment's consideration, an unerring honesty evident on her face, she responded, "I would have hurt you Sashi, but only to defend myself and weaken you enough to tie you up and call the cops. I would never kill anyone. I am not you. I am not you to so cruelly kidnap a woman and murder her."
The man retorted with sarcasm, "That's right. You are not so cruel to actually kidnap someone to kill them. Rather, you are not strong enough to kill someone. Only, you are cruel enough to let a woman be killed before your eyes and not even turn to help."
Mitra seemed to be going into a frozen standstill, becoming infernally pale, as if someone had stabbed her.
The voice of the culprit declared, "You let your friend be brutally killed and ignored her when she cried out to you for help. You turned your back on a frail girl and left her to be raped and murdered. That's you Mitra. You are the cruel one here."
Mitra's face went ghostly white, drained of blood, as if she had witnessed the horror of her life. She convulsed, choking on her breath, and then went into a painstakingly shock mode.
Sashi didn't step up to do anything.
Instead, his voice continued, "You were the reason that girl died twelve years ago, Mitra. Because you turned your back on her. You partook in her murder."
The way Mitra's whole being convoluted, trying and failing to breathe properly, grabbing the glass shard in her hand tightly enough to pierce her own hands, was horrifying. She was choking, on the verge of lapsing into a respiratory arrest, yet the man didn't come forward to help.
She tried to get out of the chair, crying, "Stop!" and then collapsed on the floor, almost passing out.
She looked like she was dying, all over again.
The video ended there.
###
Two hours before the video was shot and posted; behind the scenes.
No matter how much she tried, scrapping a hole through the wall with the single glass shard seemed more daunting a task with the limited resources Mitra had. The glass pieces cut through her palm more than they did through the wall.
As she struggled painstakingly to drive through with her determination, she heard some thuds echoing through the building. She realized the gaping hole in the wall in place of the previously sealed window was allowing sounds in the building to traverse and reach her.
Sashi must be back home.
Mitra stiffened, her heart skipping a beat.
She hadn't much thought about it, but in retrospect, she fathomed that if Sashi were to know of her attempts at an escapade, he wouldn't sit still. There were many ways in which he could make her life miserable, starting from blocking the window and tightening the guards around the room or changing the location of her confinement altogether to actually killing her on the spot.
Mitra shuddered as her thoughts ran wild. She immediately set her chair in a position to block the view of the scraped wall, grabbed her knife shaped glass shard and settled in her chair, awaiting an imminent confrontation with Sashi.
Out of all the days till then, somehow those few moments of waiting triggered an ominous feeling in Mitra's heart; as if something was about to go wrong. It was a very stomach lurching ill feeling that seeped in her.
As footsteps approached in the corridor, Mitra held her breath.
The footsteps paused. And then broke into a run.
The door to Mitra's room threw open as Sashi appeared looking every bit panicked and suffocated, his camera clenched tightly in his hand.
There she sat confidently in her chair, a smug smile on her face, a glass shard playing dangerously in her hands.
Mitra watched in amusement as relief washed over Sashi's face. She tilted her face to the side and remarked, "Next time I will give you a much better surprise."
The relief on his face was replaced with rage as he growled, "What did you do?"
"Experimented with this chair. It is pretty sturdy, given that it could break the window. Maybe I can use it to smash your head too," Mitra replied bitterly.
"Funny how you haven't tried it yet," Sashi retorted.
"I was testing with my bare fists. If they can hurt you, I guess the chair and this glass shard can work wonders," Mitra answered with a snarl.
Sashi glared at her. He was quite surprised with the sarcasm, if not humour, in Mitra's voice. It meant she was back to her fighting spirit. That sparked an excitement within him.
The glint of power that sparkled in Mitra's eyes ignited a dark desire in his twisted mind: to break herspirit apart.