One morning, as Vikram Mehta awoke from his anxious dreams, he found himself transformed into a negative margin. The realization came slowly at first – he was still in his bed, still flesh and blood – but the paperwork on his nightstand confirmed it. According to Circular 2024/XVIII/GST/UV (Used Vehicles), he had officially and irrevocably become a negative taxable entity.

It started when he tried to sell his car. The white Maruti he’d purchased five years ago for twelve lakhs now had a market value of seven lakhs – a perfectly normal depreciation that any reasonable person would understand. But the tax authorities had other ideas.

“You see, Mr. Mehta,” said the clerk behind the glass partition, his face obscured by stacks of identical forms, “your depreciation makes you a negative margin. But since you’re a registered business owner, you must pay GST (Goods and Services Tax) on the negative margin, which makes it a positive liability, unless you can prove you never claimed depreciation under Section 32, in which case you would need Form UV-18/B to declare your non-negative non-liability.”

“But I lost money on the car, and I already paid GST on the original purchase price,” Vikram protested. “How can I pay taxes now on a loss?”

The clerk’s glasses glinted. “Ah, but is it really a loss? Or is it an unrealized gain on Nirmala depreciation? Please fill out Form UV-18/C to determine your depreciation reality status.”

That evening, Vikram found himself measuring his own worth in margins. His lunch had depreciated into nothingness when it left his digestive system and could trigger a GST liability soon. His shoes had depreciated with each step – yet more taxes. Even his thoughts seemed to attract a GST liability – eighteen percent on every idea that was worth less than its original conception. Or maybe more!

His neighbor, Mrs. Sharma, had it even worse. She had sold her husband’s old Ambassador after his death, not knowing she needed to first establish her status as a non-GST-registered individual dealing in pre-owned emotional assets. The tax department calculated her grief as an appreciating asset and sent her a notice for eighteen percent of her memories.

In his dreams that night, Vikram saw an endless line of cars, each worth less than the last, stretching into infinity. At the end of the line stood a massive government building made entirely of depreciation certificates. Inside, bureaucrats calculated taxes on the building’s own declining value, using the revenue to build an even bigger building, which would then start depreciating.

When he went to appeal his case, Vikram found himself in a circular room filled with other negative margins. A man who had sold his scooter at a loss was slowly fading into a tax credit. A woman who had traded in her old car was being transformed into a depreciation schedule, her humanity dissolving into columns of numbers.

“But this is absurd!” Vikram shouted at the committee of assessment officers. “You can’t tax what isn’t there!”

“On the contrary,” replied the head officer, his smile as thin as a depreciation curve, “we find that nothing is our most taxable asset. After all, what could be more valuable than the absence of values itself?”

As Vikram left the building, he noticed his shadow had begun depreciating. According to the latest circular, all physical manifestations of existence were subject to value assessment. He wondered if he could claim his deteriorating sanity as a business loss.

In the end, Vikram decided to keep his car. It sat in his garage, neither sold nor unsold, existing in a quantum state of untaxed depreciation. Sometimes, late at night, he would sit in it and calculate its declining value, finding a strange comfort in the mathematical certainty of loss.

And somewhere in a government office, in a file labeled “Pending Negative Margin Assessments,” Vikram’s case gathered dust, depreciating at the standard rate of eighteen percent per annum, compounded quarterly, until nothing remained except the tax on nothing at all.

Years later, people would whisper about the man who became a negative margin. Some said he was still out there, endlessly circling government buildings in his unsold car, searching for the form that would transform him back into a person. Others claimed he had finally achieved a state of perfect depreciation – a tax bracket so negative it had somehow become positive again.

But in the halls of the tax department, they simply filed him away under “Miscellaneous Depreciating Assets: Human,” and added eighteen percent GST to the filing fee.

Did someone just say, “Values guide us, value doesn’t matter when it comes to GST”?