"What about the actions of yours?" Sashi asked furiously.
"Which ones?" Mitra was genuinely confused about what was being referred by him.
"You were friendly with me on your own terms," Sashi had the pained look back on his face as he burst out in anger. "I never asked you to be good to me. You were the one who spoke to me first, made friends with me and then ignored me. What was I to you? A disposable random person who entertained you for a short while?"
It exasperated Mitra further. She had no idea what he was talking about. "Listen Sashi, I have very, very few friends. Barely more than two good ones. If I make such deep friendship as what you are mentioning with anyone, I am pretty sure I would remember them. Yet, I have not even a slightest inclination of being acquainted with you before you kidnapped me. Unless you count the time I witnessed you kidnapping another woman whom you have so horribly murdered."
"In that case you have such a poor memory Mitra," Sashi said bitterly.
"I choose to differ. I remember things far too intensely." Mitra spoke out of her own conviction; she indeed remembered many incidents a little too intensely.
"Then you must be remembering your own sins as well." A tiny hint of a smile played on an otherwise savage face of Sashi.
As fragments of painful memories of past raced through Mitra's erratically pounding head, she shuddered. Yes, she remembered her sins very well. Far too well than advisable. Things that broke her down to nothing in an instant. Pieces of her past that caused such drastic sickness in her mind that no one had been able to fix her.
With a tormented gaze she nodded and said, "You have no idea."
Sashi smiled cruelly as he commented, "You know, it is quite interesting that public outside are 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 scoffed. "A hypocrite? Me? How in the whole world did I suddenly become the bad person here?"
"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 suddenly felt like something was going horribly wrong. "What do you mean?" she asked sharply.
"You tried to kill me the night I kidnapped you."
"I defended myself and tried to capture you, so I could drag you to the police station and get you prosecuted for your crimes."
Sashi laughed maniacally. "Please Mitra, if you had a knife there with you, you would have stabbed me over and over."
The outrage Mitra felt was palpable. She knew that if she had a knife there with her when Sashi kidnapped her, she might have stabbed him in her defence, impaled him just enough to capture him alive. Would she have killed him?
No.
She couldn't kill anyone.
And this contrast of their conclusions erupted in her voice as she flung her words at him, "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." She grit her teeth as she added, her words scathingly sharp, "I am not you to so cruelly kidnap a woman and murder her."
Sashi gave a crooked smile as he said, "That's right. You are not so cruel to 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 froze, her heart thumping painfully in her chest.
Sashi looked at her viciously as he said, "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."
An ache, fiercely suffocating and throbbing through her chest, engulfed Mitra as she felt her breath get stuck in her throat. Images of her past floated through her hazy head, and she ability to even breathe.
"You were the reason that girl died twelve years ago, Mitra. Because you turned your back on her. You partook in her murder." Each word came out weightily from Sashi's mouth, inflicting the pain of a thousand knives cutting through her skin.
Mitra ceased to even think about the proceedings before her. As Sashi looked at her with the same cold and hostile gaze, Mitra choked and wheezed, unable to hold herself up. In her struggle to stop the ghastly ringing in her head, she grabbed the glass shard so hard that it started cutting through her palm. Spasms shot through her arms.
Amidst the hell of her guilt that spit fire around her, Mitra could vividly see the face of the girl she dreaded the most in the world. The face of the girl she had left to die out of spite. The face that haunted her dreams and defined how she lived everyday with a burden of secrecy.
She knew she was hallucinating that face, yet she couldn't escape it.
Gasping, crying and screaming, "Stop," she tried to get out of the chair. But her legs wouldn't hold her up and she collapsed on the floor.
"Mitra..." Sashi's sympathetic voice couldn't reach her ears.
"Stop!" she cried, much louder now, in between her pants. "Get out!"
Controlling her breath, Mitra tried to erase the flashes of the horrifying past that were swamping her. "This isn't real. This isn't true," she kept telling herself. "No one knows what happened that night. He isn't supposed to know it."
The thought that a deeply buried secret of hers was somehow known to a person who wasn't present at the scene revived Mitra up enough.
Something wasn't adding up.
She looked up at Sashi and realized he was standing closer to her, bending over a little as if he were waiting to offer her his hand to help her up.
Mitra clenched her teeth and said hoarsely, "You dare say something like that? What do you even know Sashi? Nothing! You know nothing of what happened to me or her. So, don't you dare make claims of something you are ignorant of."
"I'm ignorant?" Sashi looked so amused that Mitra felt her initial rage come back seeping into her.
"You have no idea of what I know and what I have done," he said slowly, emphasizing his knowledge and actions, his voice heavy with the power of his secrecy. He crouched down, contempt disturbingly visible on his face, his gaze locking with the seething one of Mitra, and muttered, "You are too hurt and disoriented now to continue our little discussion. Take rest, Mitra. We will continue our debate tomorrow."