“I am curious about a lot of things, you piece of scum,” Mitra hissed. “What do you want with me? Kill me? Torture me? Assault or molest me? What do you plan to do?”

“None of that. I just want to talk to you.”

She scoffed, “Try fooling someone else. I know your true colours.”

“Really? What do you know?” he asked, walking towards her and lowering himself into the chair in front of her.

“You were the one who kidnapped a woman two weeks ago near the Municipal Water Tank in my neighbourhood.”

“Correct.”

It was a mixture of emotions for Mitra. She had been correct. Despite all the ignorance from the police, the lack of evidence except the unclear one she had and the doubts she had regarding what she saw that night, she was right in deducing that a serial kidnapper was lurking around her neighbourhood. That also meant that she was in extreme danger of being murdered that night. The culprit was there, right in front of her. And she was helpless to

protect herself. She had to stall time till help arrived.

“How can you be so casual about it?” she asked, exasperated with his callous tone. “You abduct and murder people and you are proud of it?”

“Not proud. We will talk about it later.”

He stood up and crossed the distance between them swiftly. Mitra sensed his movements with bated breath. She prayed for her own safety, urged her mind to be sharp and her body to be reflexive to thwart any attempts on her life that she could. She sensed he was doing something standing next to her. He was opening a box, a bottle, ripping apart a piece of paper. She couldn’t figure out what his actions were. And then she felt a cool sting on her forehead, as if there was a disinfectant poured on her wound. She realized what he was doing.

The man had brought with him a first-aid kid and had kept it on a table near Mitra. He had been mindful of the wounds they both had sustained in their fight and before he could treat himself, he felt an obligation to clean up his captive first. It wasn’t a moral obligation, rather his convention to keep her safe and healthy to a point.

As he dabbed a swab of cotton dipped in antiseptic on her wounds, Mitra tried to jerk her face away. The man grabbed her chin tightly despite her struggle to avoid his touch and held her face steady as he tended to her injuries.

It seemed very twisted for her to see such behaviour from the man. He was the reason she was hurt and locked up, yet he was tending to her wounds as if she mattered to him. She thought to herself that she probably mattered only till he killed her.

I need to get answers from him before he does anything. I need to know where we are. I need to stop him from hurting me. I need to protect myself.

Thoughts, plans of actions, propellers of confidence, determination to do what she had sketched in her mind, everything kept going around in her head as the man continued to treat her injuries.

He closed the wounds with band-aids, cotton patches and antiseptic ointments. After he was done, he took a step back studying her face. It seemed well tended to. He put aside the kit he was holding and set to take the blindfold off Mitra.

Mitra’s heart pounded as she felt the blindfold being untied. What would she see when she opens her eyes? What would the perpetrator look like? Is he a stranger or someone she knew before? What if he was an acquaintance? She hadn’t recognized his voice. But there were chances he would be someone she knew from a distance.

As the blindfold was removed and she opened her eyes, the room came into view first. It looked like an old basement room. The paint had worn off at odd places on the walls. The wooden door at the end looked aged and there were signs of cleaning done recently. There was a cosy armchair in front of her. She scanned everything clockwise from the bare walls on her left to the dark shadow to her right, till it struck her mind who that shadow belonged to.

He was standing behind her. Her anxiety still running wild, she twisted her neck sideways to get a glimpse of him just as he stepped forward and stood facing her.

It was a face she didn’t recognize, despite the déjà vu she felt. He was a young man, probably a few years older to her. There were remnants of boyishness in his countenance and he had the appearance of a clean and naïve white-collar job holder. Still, something was amiss. A connection, a reason, a hold. Something, anything that could link her with the incidents she had witnessed and undergone.

“Who are you?” she asked seriously.

“You don’t know?” He was amused.

She studied him for a moment, weighed in her answers and options and replied, “I don’t remember.”

“That’s disappointing. I was counting so much on our meeting.” He chortled as he spoke.

Mitra struggled to surf through her memories to try and remember who he was. The results were all blank. She had no idea of his identity.

What if he is purposefully messing with me? It was a sensible thought for her. “I saw you when you were kidnapping a woman,” she said strongly.

“Which we have already agreed upon as a topic for later discussions.”

“You...”

“I know you are out of swear words. Why don’t you give it a rest?” He was smiling all along.

There was more anger and frustration raging in Mitra’s mind than her accepted capacity. She didn’t know how to vent it all out.

“You can check your accommodation, by the way,” he remarked as he closed the first-aid box.

He pulled the heavy table from her right and set it in front of her, in between her and the armchair he had set for himself.

She turned her head and looked back at what was an iron bed with a soft mattress and enough blankets for a person. At the rightmost corner of the room, there was a partition with curtains and blinds.

“That’s your bathroom,” he answered the unspoken question in her head.

It shocked her. The facilities meant that he was not planning on killing her immediately. It indicated far worse situations for her, ones which she was too afraid to even think of. A lifetime of chained confinement was one of them; the simplest answer to admit.

“How long do you plan on keeping me here?” she asked him slowly.

“Depends on your behaviour and how things turn out outside.”

“Outside?”

“Yeah. Things will become interesting tomorrow.”

“What do you mean?”

“I will tell you tomorrow. Now, how about you have your dinner?” He pointed at a plate of sandwiches on the table in front of her. “I’ve got your regular order,” he added.

It was a sandwich she ordered regularly at an eatery in her neighbourhood. Mitra was mortified as she realized the implications of it. “How long have you been stalking me?” she asked.

“More than you can imagine.”

She reeled from the imagination of him sitting at the adjacent table at the small eatery in her neighbourhood, watching her as she ordered the same type of veg-sandwich every time she stopped there. How much more does he know about her?

It still didn’t add up. She was trying to map out the timeline of her witnessing him kidnap a woman till the attack on her that night when he came up to her saying, “I guess I need to give you some freedom to move around.”

Before she could analyze what he meant, he tied up her hands in a set of chains and freed the ropes that had tied her to the chair. One end of both the chains were fixed to the wall behind her while the other ends were hooked to her hands.

“Am I a prisoner?”

“Sort of. We will discuss it tomorrow. Feel free to have dinner and sleep off. Good night.”

Without another word, he left the room, locking the door behind her.