HUMOR — On forms, families, and the mathematics of invisibility

Divide by Zero

The system could not process me. I chose to take it as a compliment.

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The form was only one page. I have filled out longer forms for a gas cylinder booking.

In case of emergency, please list the number of people who depend on you financially.

I sat back and gave this genuine thought.

My wife, Minnie, runs a bridal boutique—Dazzle by Kaur.

She sources her lehengas from Delhi, drives a hard bargain with suppliers I could never handle, and sells dreams to nervous brides at prices that make my switchboard margins look like a rounding error.

When she was setting up the shop, she asked for my help with interiors, lighting layout, air conditioning, logo, pamphlets, hoarding design, and installation. I did all of it. Happily.

It is the most useful I have felt in years in a professional capacity.

These days, she occasionally asks me to replace the CR2032 batteries in her car keys or to send a technician to fix the washing machine spinner. I do these things promptly. There is also the pending matter of getting her car’s AC serviced; I will send someone from my contacts today. I have not forgotten. I am simply pacing myself.

My son Jaskaran is in Bangalore, working with a startup called SpotDraft as a product manager.

They build AI agents that help corporations manage legal documents: contracts, agreements, the fine print of the world. He earns well.

Two months ago, he drove all the way from Bangalore to Chennai with his girlfriend Rachita, just to join Minnie and me for a visit to a family we were meeting for the first time. That family will soon, formally, be ours. He did not have to come. He came anyway.

My daughter Mannat has her BA in psychology honors from Chandigarh University. Currently, she works as an HR manager for an IT company in Gurugram—remotely, from Bangalore, which is a sentence that only makes sense in this decade.

She has been with us for the past month, back in Zirakpur, getting treatment for some health matters she is managing with her usual quiet determination.

On August 30th, she is getting engaged to Kaash, a young man from Chennai she has been with for two years. It was Mannat who asked me—told me, really, with the gentle authority she has inherited from her mother—to visit his family in Chennai and put a stamp of approval on things. So Minnie and I went. Jaskaran and Rachita drove up from Bangalore and joined us. We sat in a Chennai living room, ate food I enjoyed thoroughly, and approved of everything wholeheartedly. I called it a trip. Minnie called it a success. Mannat called it long overdue.

And then there is Harcharan Kaur. My mother-in-law. Seventy-nine years old. She has lived with arthritis for nearly fifty years—not the kind that slows you occasionally, but the kind that has, over decades, quietly claimed her mobility room by room until the world she moves through now is her bedroom, her attached washroom, and the small balcony where she tends to a collection of planters with the focus of someone who has decided that if the body will not cooperate, the spirit will simply redirect. The balcony is full of green. The money plant, especially, she asked me recently to fix its vine along the wall using saddles. I sent someone. It is now running neatly along the wall, exactly as she wanted.

Two months ago, she went through a serious health crisis—multiple organs affected and a UTI that escalated—and spent several days in the ICU. Those were difficult days for everyone, spoken about quietly and not yet fully processed. She is home now, back at her planters.

Monika, her nineteen-year-old caretaker, is with her around the clock. Minnie manages all her medical routines—the physiotherapist comes daily, the masseur comes daily, and the check-ups are on schedule.

Harcharan Kaur’s dependence on me is, I will be honest, minimal. She asks me occasionally to check if her phone charger is working. Once, she needed a battery replaced in her clock. I replaced it. These are the scales on which my contribution is measured, and I have made my peace with the measurement.

I looked at the box on the form—number of dependents.

I wrote: “0”

The insurance agent—a young man whose nameplate said Tony Kaushal, energy said, 'I-had-other-plans-for-my-life'—looked at my form. Then at me. Then at the form again.

“Sir,” he said carefully, “you cannot put zero here.”

“It is the correct answer.”

“The system does not accept zero in this field.”

I leaned forward.

“Tony. I ride an Activa to work every morning. Eighth floor, Savitry Apartments, Zirakpur—which sounds distinguished until you learn the lift has been under repair since November. I run an electrical retail store. I sell wires, switchboards, and MCBs to people who always want a discount and always pay in installments. My wife employs a caretaker. My son works in AI in Bangalore. My daughter is getting engaged next month to a boy from Chennai whose mother made the best Biriyani and carrot halwa I have ever tasted.”

I paused.

“Nobody depends on me financially. I am being statistically precise.”

Tony Kaushal nodded the nod of a man absorbing information; he had not budgeted for this Thursday. He typed something. The screen flickered. A red box appeared, clean and unambiguous.

CRITICAL SYSTEM ERROR. CANNOT DIVIDE BY ZERO. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR NEAREST BRANCH.

“We are the nearest branch,” I pointed out.

“Yes, sir.”

“So I am already here.”

“Yes, sir.”

We regarded each other. Somewhere behind a partition, a printer made the sound of an institution quietly losing the will to function.

Tony picked up his phone and called someone internal. I heard him whisper, “Bhaiya, ek customer ne zero daala.” A pause. Then: “Haan. Zero. Poora zero.” A longer pause. “No, he doesn’t look upset about it.”

He was right. I was not upset.

He hung up and turned to me with the expression of a man who has encountered something the training manual did not cover. “Sir, the system calculates your premium based on financial responsibility. If the number of dependents is zero, the formula breaks down completely. You become…” he searched for the word—"undefined."

“Undefined,” I said.

“Technically, yes, sir.”

I sat with this word for a moment, the way you sit with a diagnosis that is not what you expected but somehow makes sense.

I have spent thirty years being aggressively, exhaustingly defined.

Defined as a provider. A husband. A father.

The man who remembers to pay his shop’s rent even when the sales do not match.

The man Minnie called when the boutique’s hoarding needed to go up, and no one else knew how to talk to the fabricator.

The man Jaskaran calls from Bangalore when he needs to hear a calm voice.

The man Mannat dispatched to Chennai to meet her future in-laws—not because I am the most sophisticated emissary, but because she trusted me to show up and behave well, and I like to think I did.

The man, Harcharan Kaur, calls from the other room to check if her charger is working, not because Monika cannot do it, but because some things you still want done by family.

And now this machine—in a second-floor office with a tube light that flickered every thirty-eight seconds, I counted—had reviewed the financial architecture of my life and returned not a rejection, not a low score, but an error.

Undefined.

I remembered this from a lecture I half-attended in an engineering classroom in 1992. Undefined is not nothing. It is what happens when a calculation meets something it was never designed to accommodate. The system does not fail. The system simply does not have the range.

I found, to my own mild surprise, that I was not embarrassed by this. I was something closer to relieved. Perhaps even, quietly, proud.

Because here is what the form could not see:

I have arrived at a point in life where no one needs to be rescued by me.

Minnie built something extraordinary and funds it herself.

Jaskaran found his footing in a city I have never fully understood, doing work I cannot explain to relatives.

Mannat is about to begin a new chapter she chose entirely on her own terms and trusted me enough to include me in the ceremony of it.

Harcharan Kaur is cared for and watched over; her balcony green and her moneyplant climbing the wall. Everyone is fine.

And I — I am the reason some of that fineness exists, even if no spreadsheet will ever say so.

“What are my options?” I asked.

Tony had not expected this tone. “Sir, you could — put one.”

“One dependent.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who?”

A small pause. “Yourself, sir. Some customers list themselves.”

I considered this. A man so thoroughly self-sufficient — or perhaps so comprehensively released from financial claim by everyone around him — that he becomes his own dependent.

There was either a philosophy or a quiet joke in that, and I decided it was both.

“And if I list myself,” I said, “the system resolves?”

“Yes, sir.”

He typed. The red box vanished. A premium appeared. Given everything, it was not unreasonable.

I signed.

Under "Number of Dependents," I wrote “1.”

Tony had already filled in "Self" under the name field, with the practiced calm of someone who has done this before and made a kind peace with it.

He stapled the papers. He looked faintly relieved.

As I stood to leave, I stopped. “Tony, one thing.”

“Sir?”

“Does the system have a field for people who do not need my money but regularly need me to be steady while the world moves around them?”

He blinked.

“Minnie calls when a Delhi supplier backs out on an order. Jaskaran calls when Bangalore feels too large. Mannat calls when she needs someone to show up in Chennai and not embarrass her. Harcharan ji calls me to check her charger—not because no one else can, but because I am still, in some old and quiet way, her person too.” I paused. “If those counted, the number would not be zero. It would be four. Five, if you include my downstairs neighbour who borrows my ladder and returns it with fewer rungs than it left with.”

Tony Kaushal looked at me for a moment that was longer than insurance requires.

“That field does not exist, sir.”

“No,” I said. “It never does.”

I walked out into the June afternoon. The sun over Zirakpur sat in the sky like an invoice—bright, insistent, impossible to ignore. I unlocked my Activa, settled onto it, and sat for a moment before starting the engine.

I had just insured myself. Listed myself as my own dependent. Signed a document that confirmed, in the language of actuarial science, that I was a self-contained, self-referential unit — a man who had, without quite planning it, become sufficient unto himself.

My phone buzzed. Minnie, a reminder about the AC servicing—I had not forgotten; I was pacing myself. Jaskaran, a text asking if AI would eventually replace product managers, which I found funny in a way I could not fully explain. Mannat, something about the engagement arrangements that required my opinion, which meant it had already been decided, and she was being courteous.

I put the phone in my pocket.

Started the Activa.

Pulled out into the road, the June sun warm on my shoulders, the turban doing what it has always done—keeping me unhurried, keeping me composed.

"Undefined," the machine had called me. And perhaps that was closer to the truth than any number I could have written in that box. Not nothing. Not everything. Just a man, the formula could not quite hold—the one who replaces batteries, sends technicians, shows up in Chennai, fixes chargers, and quietly keeps the whole arrangement running.

Still moving. Still useful. Still here.

Insured, finally, against something.

What exactly? I had not thought to ask.

Some things are better left undefined.

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