The woman went limp completely in the arms of the assailant and it finally hit Mitra that she was witnessing another murder. She jerked forward screaming at the top of her lungs in horror and aggression.
The man moved faster than her, dragging away the woman with him and slipping into the shadows of the adjacent street.
Mitra ran ahead with a war cry, slinging her backpack in her hands poised as a weapon, not sure how but very much inclined to kill the culprit and save the woman. She wasn't sure if she was running to rescue the figment of her imagination of Lekha's past reflection or for the present woman.
Still, she ran.
The street was dark and empty. There were vehicles parked on the sides. Mitra searched vehemently as people started opening their windows and balcony doors to look in at the commotion.
As lights turned on around the place and the neighbours came out, Mitra frantically searched everywhere, behind the parked cars and in between the vehicles for the woman and her assailant, to no fruition. The man seemed to have vanished with the lifeless body of the victim lady.
To the people who enquired over the walls of their houses about what happened, Mitra relayed the scene she witnessed in broken sentences, stuttering, and her teeth chattering from the chills she felt all over her body due to the shock.
She called up the police and they soon arrived to find the street in a commotion. People had started searching too, aiding Mitra and asking her questions.
The police conducted a preliminary investigation.
When they asked her about the woman who got abducted, how she looked like and if it was someone Mitra knew, Mitra was speechless. She didn't remember the woman's face at all.
She had been so taken aback by the eruption of the incident, so intent on catching the culprit that she had focused more on the assailant than the victim.
Did I look at her properly? No. I didn't. Is it someone I know? I don't know.
Questions, doubts, answers and regrets ran wildly through her mind. The images of the woman's face were interspersed with those of Lekha's. All Mitra could see in her head was Lekha's face and not the woman's. She knew she had messed it up again.
The police couldn't find anything and there were no witnesses other than Mitra, who strangely said she wasn't able to recollect the woman's face or the culprit's either. She had noted the man's clothes and that he was on the younger side of age count.
The neighbourhood people had treaded all over the place in search of the missing woman, tampering with and erasing the traces of the struggle that Mitra had reported. There simply were not enough leads.
In a frantic attempt to save her sanity from getting tangled in the nightmares of the past, Mitra called up Vishal and let him on in the whole happening, voicing her doubts, "What if it wasn't real? What if I had hallucinated the whole thing?"
"Mitra... You didn't, okay? It must have been real," Vishal tried to reason.
"No, the police couldn't find anything. No one else saw or heard anything. What if it was all in my head? Maybe I am going senile?" she choked.
"Why now?" Vishal questioned in an attempt to rebuke her assumptions. "Why after so many years? There needs to be a trigger to set up such kind of hallucinations Mitra, and there haven't been any. Let's not jump to conclusions. We'll wait for a while and see if the police find anything or if you have a similar kind of vision again. In case it happens again, we will figure out how to get it treated. We can handle it. Okay?"
Mitra gave it a moment of thought and grunted an agreement.
"But Mitra, I am more worried about you," Vishal expressed his concerns, dread evident in his deep voice. "If it all happened in real, you witnessed another murder, and this time much closer home. It is very likely the murderer might come after you. Can you just leave the place for a while? Come to my home here. Or visit your parents. Take a vacation. Just don't stay there," he pleaded.
"No," Mitra refused with conviction. "I need to stay here. I can't keep running. I will be prepared this time."
She was determined not to go down that hole of abandoning a victim again, of getting into a guilt trap and a cage of fear in her mind. She resolutely wanted to do anything to catch the culprit this time, no matter what the cost of that attempt would be. And this time, she didn't mind trading her life to rest her guilty heart by nabbing the murderer she saw.
That was when Mitra started simulating the situations of encountering the murderer, of catching him in case he attacked her.
Two weeks after that, Sashi came for her.