"What do you mean that's the limit?"

The grumpy clerk on the other side of the glass rolled his eyes, scratching the top of his nose. "Ten thousand is the limit madam, you can't withdraw more than that at such a short notice. Now please, let me leave. It's lunch time." He motioned for her to move away from the line, pulling down the shutter and getting up from his seat. The fifteen or so people queued behind her groaned when they heard about the extra waiting hour they had to endure.

Madhu returned back to the bench, sitting down next to Nakul. "Now what do I do?"

"Maybe avoid throwing away all the money you have?" he suggested cheekily, letting out a short laugh when she lightly smacked his arm in annoyance. "I'll get the car, wait here."

She nodded absently, counting the bundle of cash before separating the bills and keeping them in different compartments of her large handbag.

Madhulika had woken up that day to realise she only had three thousand Rupees worth of cash left. She expected the twenty thousand bucks she had taken out before leaving Delhi to last her sufficiently for the two months she planned to spend in Bhabra. But one thing led to another and that money disappeared in just two weeks. Her credit card was useless here, since all businesses were dependent on hard cash. Madhu needed more money for what she had planned to do. Unfortunately, Sakshinagar had branches of only government banks and not private ones. It was a blessing that her father preferred the former and she had a joint account with him, otherwise things could've gotten awkward.

She wasn't exactly fond of being poor, even if it was for a few days.

Her Honda rolled in front of the bank and Madhu rushed out to sit in the passenger seat. Hitting the road a minute later, Nakul cursed under his breath at the slow-moving jam of vehicles on the uneven roads, which consisted of a hoard of trucks, noisy two-wheelers and animal carts. She didn't blame him, it seemed like people in Sakshinagar respected traffic rules as much as Delhiites respected parking tickets.

They made another stop at the post office to collect the mail her father had sent, before again driving off to the restaurant.

Madhu didn't know how to act when they finally reached the restaurant. The waiter led them to a two-seater table right in the middle of the room. It was a family place, with children running and chasing each other in the spaces between the tables and parents yelling at them to finish their food. She felt everyone's eyes on them and couldn't help but feel out of place in her kurti and jeans, conscious that she was the only adult female in the room who wasn't wearing Indian clothes. Or at least a hundred percent Indian.

Nakul, on the other hand, looked completely at ease as he flicked through the menu. "Would you like stuffed dosa or plain?"

"Whatever is good really. I don't know much about this place."

"Their special is tandoori chicken dosa, but I suspect you're vegetarian?"

She nodded. "Two years and counting."

"Right." He waved over a waiter and ordered plain paneer dosa for Madhu and a chicken one for himself. They fell into amiable silence, sipping on their glasses of complimentary rasam, which was a tad bit too spicy for Madhu but still good.

"Your mom was vegetarian right? I remember how she hated it when Thakur sahib would cook meat in the kitchen," he said eventually.

Madhu smiled at the memory. "Yeah. She hated that I took after my father and grandfather instead of her. But hey, I'm clean now, guess she would've been happy about that." If not anything else, she silently added.

Her expression must've revealed something for Nakul leaned forwards, placing his elbows on the table. "She would've been happy with you in general. I read that interview of yours, about building employer-employee trust in an organisation. Pretty rad if I may be honest."

Many people had congratulated her about bagging a spot in the business section of a major national daily newspaper, but for some reason, the knowledge that Nakul had read it made her want to scream into a pillow. She was already conscious of the heat creeping up her neck.

"Thanks," she mumbled, avoiding his eyes to search for a change of subject. "How long would Suman stay with her mother?"

The easy look on his face tensed a little. "I'm not sure, she didn't say anything about returning anytime soon."

"She--she told me that Raju would come to get her himself," Madhu hesitated before adding the next part. "As if this wasn't the first time something like this has happened."

Nakul didn't look surprised.

The waiter came back with their food and it was only when he had left that he spoke again. "I've only known her for a year, so I don't know, but I suspect Raju isn't worthy of a husband of the year award by a long shot. I hope she doesn't return anytime soon; she needs to recover away from him. A miscarriage would be too much to heal from with his ass berating her constantly."

Madhu pursed her lips, feeling a twinge of guilt upon realising that he didn't know Suman had been thrown out of her own home. She wanted to tell Nakul everything, but she was afraid he would kill Raju after knowing the truth. Maybe that was why Suman had made her promise to remain mum. But Madhu didn't like it one bit.

"I've always felt that walking away from a marriage is easier than people think, yet Suman refuses to walk away."

"Maybe it is in Delhi. But here if a woman chooses to go on her own way, then she is an ungrateful slut. And if her husband divorces her, then she probably deserved it. She can't win either way."

Madhu didn't know what was worse. His words or the matter-of-fact way he said it while eating his dosa. She tried to eat hers in order to sort out her thoughts, the tangy taste of the stuffing exploding in her mouth.

"Why didn't you ever marry then? You're a man, wouldn't've have faced that problem," she asked before she could clamp down the question, swallowing her bite quickly and going for another.

"Couldn't find anyone." He shrugged.

"There must've been someone."

This time he avoided her eyes, playing with his food. "Her name was Vidushi and she was my best friend's sister. Pretty cliché but well, what can you do?" A wistful smile took over his face. "Her father was in the army and she hated it. Not the army but the life you know? The moving around and the long months of separation from loved ones. We always argued about that, but I thought we'd find a way. She was perfect. We were perfect. But then she asked me to choose and I chose my job."

"Do you regret that?"

"No." He sighed heavily. "No, I don't. Only sometimes I wonder what would've happened if I had asked her to wait, to adjust with my job for the rest of her life. She would've agreed upon insistence; maybe she was even waiting for me to change her mind. When I didn't, she gave up and said yes to the first suitor. Now she's married with kids and there's no going back."

He looked down and started eating again, and Madhu was too busy battling with her own feelings to try to say something comforting. Her mind at that moment was a strange mix of envy and disappointment that they could not be together. Nakul, of all people, deserved the comfort and happiness of a family.

They finished their lunch in silence after that, and when the bill arrived, she insisted that they split it, but Nakul said it was his treat. "I know you're technically my boss, but I can handle this one. You can pay for ice-cream."

She did exactly that when they stepped out in the late afternoon breeze. Buying two large chocolate cones from the nearest Amul stall, she handed one to Nakoo and they walked down the empty street to where the car was parked in a secluded corner, right beneath the shade of a Neem tree. Madhu climbed to sit on its bonnet.

"So," Nakul said, leaning against the Honda's front next to her. "Why didn't you ever marry?"

She hesitated. "When Ma died, I sort of...immersed myself in my internship at Papa's firm, on top of helping him out with his plans to expand in the hotel business and my own graduation. Roshan thought I was distancing myself from him, but he did wait, for two years. When I said no to his proposal, he thought it was because I didn't love him."

Madhu could feel Nakul's gaze on her as she quietened abruptly, trying to find a way to tell him the rest without making herself seem like a total bitch. "My friend Shikha started going out with him a year later. I assured her that I was okay with them dating when I wasn't. They married six months later."

When Nakul softly prompted her, Madhu somehow managed to say what she hadn't even admitted to herself. "Roshan was wrong you know? I did love him. I told myself it was that love which kept sending me back to him, any guilt I felt was justified on the grounds that Shikha had broken the sister code first." She laughed humourlessly. "I kept going back, later telling myself it wasn't just love but also convenience. Who had time to date? I had a business to run and him and I already had a rapport, so we carried on. Now he's divorcing Shikha, but I can't bring myself to marry him."

"Because you don't love him?"

"I--no I think a part of me still does, but it isn't enough to compensate for everything else I feel."

Madhu wasn't aware of the moisture that had collected in her eyes until she felt his thumb wipe it away. Sitting cross-legged on the bonnet, she had to tilt her head slightly to see him standing in front of her.

"I won't lie to you Madhulika, that was a shitty thing you did," he said, the hand which had wiped her tear cupping her jaw, sending warmth from that point of contact to her entire face. "But it is in the past and one bad decision doesn't make you a bad person."

As she stared back into his warm brown eyes, she wanted to believe him. She really, really did. "I'm certainly a worse person than you are."

"You don't know that," he whispered. "I've bullied people, I've killed people. It was my duty, my dharma as people say. And the men I killed were enemies of the nation, even terrorists. But that doesn't make it completely moral."

Involuntarily, her fingers traced the scar on his right cheek, following it till she reached the damaged ear, which even plastic surgery couldn't quite make normal, and which wouldn't hear any sound even with the help of the aid he was wearing in his left ear. Nakul watched her watching him.

"Did you get this while killing people too?"

The hand on her jaw moved to push her hair behind her ear and then came down to rest on her knee. "Yes," he said. "But I definitely don't feel guilty about the deaths I caused on that particular day."

Before she could process the meaning behind those cryptic words, he stepped back and took the empty paper-wrapper of her ice-cream from her hand, throwing it away with his own. She hopped down from the bonnet, slipping inside the passenger seat since she hated to drive on the roads of Sakshinagar. Nakul sat down next to her a minute later.

She absently watched him reverse and then manoeuvre across the bumpy roads that led to Bhabra. Regardless of what he had told her, Madhu still felt him to be a much better person that she could ever be. He hadn't asked Vidushi to wait the same way Madhu hadn't asked Roshan to wait. But unlike him, Madhu had chosen to wreak havoc on the marriage of her ex. All these years she had blamed Roshan for her own decision and while he was at fault, so was she.

The sun had started to set by the time they reached home. Feeling a bit too overwhelmed, Madhu muttered a quick goodbye before rushing out of the car and into the house. Closing her bedroom door behind her, she sank on the floor. She didn't know how long she sat there for, not moving a muscle whilst deep in thought. Eventually, she removed her purse from her shoulder and rummaged through it, pulling out the fat envelope her father had sent.

She hadn't thought it was possible to feel any lower but as she scanned the contents of the letter, Madhu was forced to accept the reality of her visit to Bhabra.

It was an offer from the owner of a woodworks factory to purchase the land. Madhu had never heard of them, so she figured her Papa had approached them. The offer was better than anything she could get for the property; they were ready to pay twenty percent more than the market price.

But they wanted the whole thing, including the house.

And Madhu didn't know what she would tell Nakul.