India’s family law was written to discourage divorce, and in that sense it has succeeded brilliantly: The last census, in 2011, showed that the number of Indians who described themselves as separated was nearly three times the number who were divorced.

The country’s legal code offers a notably narrow selection of divorce-worthy faults, among them cruelty, incurable leprosy and renunciation of the world by entering religious orders. Many applicants plead “mental cruelty,” but defining mental cruelty is a murky affair, often coming down to a judge’s discretion.

“No uniform standard can ever be laid down for guidance,” declared a Supreme Court panel in 2007, adding, unhelpfully, that “what is cruelty in one case may not amount to cruelty in another case.”

Here are some examples of the idiosyncratic ways judges used their discretion to support claims of cruelty (and approve divorce):

• Forcing a husband to move out of his parents’ home.

“In a Hindu society, it is a pious obligation of the son to maintain the parents. If a wife makes an attempt to deviate from the normal practice and normal custom of the society, she must have some justifiable reason for that,” the court found. “In our opinion, normally, no husband would tolerate this, and no son would like to be separated from his old parents.”