Mitra's mind was going blank, her heart panging painfully. It was like she was being let in to see a nightmare that could have very well turned into a reality.
Sashi could see through that fear of Mitra.
He shrugged and continued, "Anyways, thanks to the dark connections that I already have in Mumbai and Bangalore, those two pimps assumed I wasn't a risk to them. I knew their plan. The woman had been devising ways to lure you away to a deserted place from where you could be abducted. And you, with that naive act of yours of a "good person", would have easily fallen in her trap. So, that night, when she was going to intercept your way home, I attacked her from behind and whisked her away. That was when you saw me and assumed I was kidnapping an "innocent" woman."
He laughed, "Innocent, huh? She would have sold you off in a day."
He leaned forward, looking straight into Mitra's frozen eyes and said, "I saved you, Mitra. You should thank me."
Mitra was shaking. To think that she had come so close to losing her whole life at the hands of a women trafficking ring numbed her brain. It baffled her that the man who had been confining her to a basement for weeks now had actually saved her from that fate. She couldn't think any more.
"Shocked, are you?" he asked her with a smirk. "Now you understand why no one reported a woman missing when you raised such a huge alarm and had the police scan the whole area. She wasn't a local resident there, didn't live or work there and no one even knew her properly. The other rogues who worked with her couldn't possibly report her missing. What would they have told the police? That a pimp went missing while trying to kidnap another girl? They assumed that the woman ran away somewhere without telling them. The other man who had been brokering along with her also went missing. So, they thought the woman took him with her on the run. People in this business often run away with stashed away money, you know."
There was something sinister about the way Sashi was smirking.
"What did you do to her?" Mitra finally managed to ask.
"I killed her. I told you that already." He was saying it as if it were obvious. "I killed both those pimps and buried them outside the city."
Mitra gasped, unable to breathe. She was finding it difficult to sit, her head spinning wildly. She leaned forward weakly, dropping her head into her hands.
Sashi paused for a moment and added in a chilling tone, "Like I said, if anyone tries to touch you I will kill them. In cold blood."
Mitra was almost hyperventilating. This was something she had never imagined.
It wasn't a simple case of right versus wrong or morality anymore. Sashi very well committed two murders, but they were to save her from being traded and sold like an animal. He had killed two brutal criminals, something that might not have been so wrong when done within the bounds of law.
Still, was that the right way to handle things?
Couldn't he have saved her without having to kill them?
They did deserve death, given the number of girls they had illegally and horrendously trafficked by then, the many innocent lives they had destroyed.
Still...
"Did you have to kill them?" Mitra asked quietly, her head buried in her hands.
"What else should I have done?" Sashi asked scornfully.
Mitra raised her head just enough to look at his unapologetic face and opined, "You could have reported them to the police."
Sashi laughed again in jeer. "God, you still can't understand it, can you? You really think the police are not aware of the women trafficking rings? The people running those businesses all have connections within the police department everywhere. Money and favours keep flowing between both those parties. That dastardly woman herself had a couple of cops in her palm, well fed with bribes to let her off the hook and inform her of possible police crackdowns, so she could always be unscathed."
That was true and Mitra knew it. Crime world ran with the assistance of corruption within the administrative, political and law enforcement bodies. Reporting a few of the small fish was not going to change anything. In turn, those two rogues could have exacted vengeance from either Sashi or her.
Sashi took it that Mitra understood the reality. He tilted his head and felt like being a bit more honest. "Besides," he added, "What would I have told the police if they asked me how I knew those two pimps? I can't possibly reveal all my dark background connections. They would have handcuffed me first."
Mitra studied him in dismay. Her head was hurting from all the information and she was trying to find a way in which Sashi could have salvaged the situation without drawing blood. His actions seemed justified to an extent. Yet, there was one other option.
"You could have alerted me," she voiced it. She straightened her spine and sitting erect, shot the last blockade she had. "You could have told me what was happening behind. I could have stopped them. We could have stopped them."
Sashi looked at her as if she had lost her mind. "Alert you? How? I have been following you for years. Did you notice me ever? Had I come over to you all of a sudden and said a couple of rogues were trying to trap you, would you have believed me? Would you have even looked at me? No way! Not at all. You would have doubted me and reported me to the police instead. And what do you mean by "we could have stopped"? Who's "we"? You and your boyfriend, or you and me? You definitely would have ignored me. So, no, I didn't alert you."
Mitra and Sashi both knew he was right. Mitra would have gotten scared the minute a stranger approached her with a theory that someone was targeting her for trafficking. She would have suspected him of ulterior motive and reported him instead.
Vishal would have dug into his details to see if he was a credible person or not, and judging Sashi's background, they would have gotten Sashi locked up instead.
Human instinct of avoiding an obvious truth of judgmental attitude: Mitra still felt like defending herself.
"You don't know that Sashi. I could have listened to you. I could have heeded your warning about them." She wasn't sure if she sounded even a little bit sincere. The words seemed forceful even to her.
Sashi scoffed. "You?! You would have never done that; because you didn't even look at me when I came to you."