As a police official questioned her in a serious tone about the previous evening's happenings, Mitra replied honestly to an extent: till the part where Lekha and her friends had left her injured on the road.
The police officer nodded and was about to turn away, satisfied with the answer he received that tallied back to the accounts of the other witnesses, when Mitra interceded him softly, "I saw her with someone."
The policeman jerked towards her, "What?"
"I was walking home a little later and I ran into her on the road. She was with someone," Mitra replied with her eyes in a daze, her voice quivering, as if she were answering in a trance; a trance created by her guilty conscience.
"With whom?" the policeman asked, hurriedly signalling another of his colleagues to join in the conversation.
"I don't know. I don't remember his face. I have never seen him before. He just seemed young," Mitra answered. Again, honest to an extent.
"Where did you see them?" the policeman asked, making a note.
Mitra gave them the location.
"At what time was this?"
"I didn't note the time. I reached home at around 8 pm. So, it would be ten minutes before that."
"What were you doing out till then?" the policeman eyed her suspiciously.
Mitra trembled. She couldn't tell them that she was at the cove near the lake. That was close to the actual crime scene. If anyone knew she had been there, they would implicate her in the crime somehow, which would be a false accusation.
"I... I took a walk," she said, owning up only part of the reality that had happened, her eyes blinking in fear.
The policeman's voice changed to an intimidating tone, "A walk? Where? Alone?"
Mitra nodded hysterically. "Alone, yes. I was injured and crying because my classmates hit me. I didn't want to go home with an upset face; my grandparents would have asked me why I was hurt and if they got to know I was bullied by my classmates they would have gotten really angry. They would then come to the school to complain and it would have created a complicated situation in the class, which I can't handle. So, I just stayed out till I calmed down."
The policeman stared intently at her. Mitra looked so earnest and terrified that he could feel her angst and understand her stance.
"Where did you go for a walk?" he asked her, relaxing his interrogative voice a little.
Mitra mentioned a few random paths that she would have ideally taken if she hadn't gone to the lake. She didn't fathom how she was able to come up with the routes so cleverly and at such short span; it was as if her mind was mapping a false memory that was so strong to mask her actual actions.
She insisted that she walked really slow and stayed rooted at certain corners to prevent passers-by from noticing her bawling her eyes out.
"And then?" he prodded her.
"I realized it was getting late and started walking back. Then I ran into her and the man she was with. And... I just left on my own avoiding her," Mitra muttered the statement that omitted a lot of the truth.
"Why did you just walk away when she was with someone you don't know?" the policeman questioned.
Mitra gazed into the his face, trying to come up with the appropriate answer.
"I... I was scared. She had just hit me an hour before then. Why would I want to meet her again? So, I avoided her," she lied.
It made sense to the police; no victim would want to run in and have a conversation with the perpetrator a mere hour after an assault.
"What were they both doing on the road?" the policeman asked her.
Mitra gulped. She just couldn't tell them what she had really witnessed. She would be digging her own grave if she confessed.
Her heart beating like crazy against her ribs, she gulped, breathed a lungful and answered, "They were standing silently. They noticed me walking towards them. I just looked at Lekha and, didn't feel like going near her. So, I walked away in the opposite direction, avoiding that road and took the next street to reach my home."
"What did he look like?"
"I didn't notice him properly. I was too fixed on avoiding Lekha. He looked young and wore dark clothes and a hat. That's all I observed. I have never seen him before," she answered the last part honestly.
The policeman and his colleague looked at each other. They had something on hand.
###
Things steamrolled for the next couple of weeks. Mitra was horribly exhausted, more from the pain of hearing about Lekha's death and how she was found almost every waking moment, than from the actual investigation. She lost count of the number of times she followed the police for a crime scene reconstruction, chalking out the route she took that evening and pointing out the last place she found Lekha.
The only miracle to her was the way she remained strong while lying about the circumstances to the many people she answered. The hardest part was when she first spoke to Lekha's father in the interrogation room to inform him about witnessing his daughter with a man who could very well be the murderer.
One look at Lekha's father's pale face and Mitra felt like choking; she couldn't breathe.
He looked so haunted and devastated at the loss of his only daughter, gazing at Mitra in the hopes of listening to a helpful piece of information, that it pushed Mitra into the furthest corners of her deeply guilty mind.
Unable to hold a steady eye-contact with him, she bent her head, gasping for short breaths and recounted slowly the same details she fed the police.
"I'm sorry," she added at the end in a hoarse whisper, without meeting his eye. "I'm really sorry I didn't know what was about to happen to her then. Had I even had a hunch of the horror that would unfold to her, I would have tried to help her."
She finally took the courage to lift her head. Lekha's father was regarding her with an unreadable expression. He closed his eyes in angst and spoke softly, "Who would have known? Had I known what my daughter was going through, I wouldn't have stayed at work till late night. None of us had imagined it. It's not your fault."
It was her fault, and Mitra knew it. That hurt her even more. Her eyes poured out silent tears as she sobbed.
"I'm sorry she hit you," Lekha's father said slowly. "She was never a bully; I didn't raise her like that," he conveyed an apology that should have been given by his daughter. He stroked Mitra's head fondly once and left the interrogation room.
Mitra met him multiple times after that, but they never spoke to each other. Mitra would gesture a 'namaste' and he would give a curt nod as a greeting. Everyone could notice the way Mitra was losing weight and turning into a walking set of bones.
What they didn't know was the literal world of nightmares Mitra was living in.
Her concealment of the truth from the police and Lekha's family was tripping her into a trap of guilt which she seemed to have embraced involuntarily. She was getting nightmares every time she slept: of Lekha being stabbed and getting drowned in the lake, of Lekha attacking Mitra, of Lekha screaming at Mitra for help.
In all the scenarios, Mitra was standing rooted to the ground, unable to move, shaking terribly in fear.
That was her the start of her recurring episodes of sleep paralysis.