He stood without waiting for a response from her. Looking around at the mess in the room, he noted, "I will clean this up. And I trust you will put off your idea of digging your way out with that tiny glass piece. Your hands can't take any more damage to them."
With that he turned around, switched off the camera and left the room taking it with him.
Mitra's heart was still throbbing painfully and her breath was ragged. She tried to regain herself and repeatedly failed.
It was her deepest secret and darkest fear.
Yes, she had left a girl to die. No matter how many times she told herself that it wasn't intentional, that she hadn't imagined that the consequences of her impulsive retaliation would cost her two lives – one of her acquaintance's and the other of her own guilt-free self, she couldn't erase the blemish the incident had inflicted on her.
How did Sashi know any of that?
He was bluffing to hurt her.
What if he wasn't?
Mitra couldn't think anything logical beyond that. Her brain got cluttered with the images of the girl she got killed. She tried to control her thoughts and her breath, with not much success.
It was like she was being punished all over again, only much more intensely this time. She knew her sleep paralysis would be following her panic attack. It always happened in the same pattern.
The sleepless, horror filled nights would haunt her for a long time, now that the wall of secrecy was broken, and she was being laid bare with her ghastly past visible to the whole world.
Submerged in her pathetic attempts at regaining her physical strength and intellect, she didn't notice Sashi stepping into the room. He took one look at her, shook his head in austerity and set a First-Aid box and a plate of Mitra's regular meal on the table next to her bed. Without a word, he left.
###
Vishal had been in the police station the whole day, getting the data on the suspicious internet café, its owners and customers, recording everything in detail. From enquiring the neighbours of the store, they deduced that Nitish Naik had been the one who opened the store and visited it once to take care of some financial matters; issues which Pritam wasn't privy to.
DSP Sandeep had requested some known cops in Mumbai to trace out both Nitish Naik and Manoj Bhal.
The patterns of uploading the video had all been same, from the computer system that Pritam used at his desk, indicating it was done by the same person or someone who guided different persons to work in the same way.
They could only speculate that the culprit was either a regular customer of the café, or someone who had access to the store in ways normal customers wouldn't. Someone whom Pritam wouldn't categorize as a suspect.
Or someone whose identity he was tight lipped about. No amount of cajoling, emotional blackmail or physical abuse could wrench out an answer from him. He kept repeating the same things over and over, that he knew nothing of the videos or who uploaded them. He looked surprised and flustered when they confronted him with the fact that the culprit had used Pritam's computer in the store yet denied any knowledge of the happenings.
The enquiry only revealed that the café owners, both the one on paper and the one who had appeared in person, were running hawala transactions. The café was a place where one of their men, whom Pritam swore to not know at all, did the transactions.
It all seemed so random to Vishal and the police. They were sure some of the hawala transactions, if traced accurately, would be leading them to the depths of new crimes, ones that had gone by undetected or been misread, crimes that didn't seem to be connected to Mitra in any angle.
They needed to find the culprit, or at least find a few correct details regarding him to untangle some of the misleading strings.
They were wading through another fruitless round of interrogation of Pritam when one of the constables ran into the room and called Vishal and Raghavan to step out. Vishal imagined he would have received another tip regarding the café's operations when the constable thrust his phone towards Vishal, Mitra's latest video playing on it.
"This came in just now, uploaded to our website," the constable panted.
As the video played out, Vishal watched it first with an anticipation and hope for the best, and then in horror as the events of the confrontation unfolded before him. He didn't hear anything else as Raghavan kept wondering aloud what the video was all about.
Vishal had realized almost immediately what was happening.
He stepped away, pulling his own phone out, reached a remote corner of the police station, browsed the video and played it again. He played it a couple more times, absorbing each and every statement that was being made by both parties in the video. He watched with his heart sinking as Mitra choked and collapsed. He could see how tortured and on the verge of a horrible mental breakdown she was.
There were two possible implications of the video: the video was shot before Mitra was murdered and released now to display the reason why she was killed; or Mitra was still alive.
Vishal was so conflicted with the happenings and their consequences that he didn't realize tears were streaming down his face as he kept grasping for his breath amidst anxiety.
Mitra was alive. That was the only conclusion he could reach to.
And that meant, she was dying now.
As he replayed the video, he registered a few things again: the prospect of a girl whom Sashi was claiming to be a victim of Mitra's disregard and spite, and the events of the night the said incident had happened.
There were only two people in the whole world who knew what had happened the night Mitra turned her back on a victim of rape and murder. Three, if you included the culprit too. The two others were Mitra and Vishal.
Neither of them had ever spoken out about the real turn of events of that night to a third party. It was one horrible secret that they both shared, one which had subjected Mitra to sleep paralysis and nightmare disorder for more than a decade and led Vishal to pursue a career in investigative journalism.
The fact that a third person knew about it meant only two things: Sashi was there at the time of the incident or he is a confidante to the real criminals of the murder he spoke about.