Pride & Purity: An Anatomy Of Cleansing

They say it starts with clarity.

A clean sentence.

A moral diagram drawn like someone trying to flatten God into something explicable.

“They are the problem.”

Simple.

Comforting.

Like switching off a light in a room you refuse to look at properly.

And the mind relaxes.

Because the mind prefers reduction over responsibility, even when reduction includes itself.

They say it’s not hatred.

Hatred is too crude, too visible, too honest to pass inspection.

So it is rephrased.

Cleanliness.

Hygiene.

Maintenance.

“Sorting things out.”

Because words, when washed often enough, forget what blood tastes like.

First, there are Muslims.

Too visible.

Too loud.

Too incompatible with the parts of imagination never trained to hold difference without translating it into threat.

“They must be the reason.”

For noise.

For decay.

For everything that refuses to behave.

And purity arrives like a polite administrator.

Stamp.

File.

Remove.

It works.

Because systems always feel like progress when they are allowed to define what counts as absence.

No Muslims.

Silence, neatly packaged.

The world briefly behaving like a well-trained metaphor.

And for a moment, it feels like peace.

The kind of peace a locked room feels after it has finished pretending nothing was inside it.

But silence has memory.

It doesn’t forget what it was asked to erase.

So the question shifts.

Because it always does.

Now it is Christians.

Then Sikhs.

Then Parsis.

Then whoever still remains outside the current boundary of resemblance.

Because purity is not a belief.

It is a narrowing mechanism.

And narrowing does not stop.

It refines its criteria.

At some point, the mirror stops reflecting enemies

and starts reflecting variations of proximity.

And then the argument does what it was always going to do:

it turns inward.

Because a logic built on removal

does not recognise arrival points.

Only remaining inventory.

So now it is not “them.”

It is “not us.”

First, the Dalits.

Then the rest.

Then the subdivisions of the rest.

Each removal feels like correction.

Each correction feels like progress.

Each progress quietly erases the memory of what progress was correcting.

Until there are no strangers left.

Only degrees of suspicion within proximity.

Not difference anymore.

Just calibrated versions of “not pure enough.”

And someone, somewhere, still insists:

“This is not hatred.”

“This is order.”

“This is necessary.”

But order, left alone long enough,

stops describing reality

and begins editing the memory of it.

And purity,

that beautiful original excuse,

finally completes its arithmetic.

It was never about others.

It was about reduction.

Not difference removed.

Difference as an idea, subtracted.

And when nothing remains that qualifies as “other,”

the system does not collapse.

It stabilises.

It reruns.

Because systems like this do not end in victory.

They end in exhaustion disguised as completion.

So yes, it begins with enemies.

It always does.

But it does not end with enemies.

It ends with recognition failing its own definitions;

inside a closed loop of certainty

that has forgotten

how to recognise anything

that isn’t already scheduled for removal.

And somewhere inside that loop,

something finally stops pretending this is metaphor.

This was never cleansing.

Not order.

Not even belief.

Just cannibalism

learning how to sound like reason

so it can continue uninterrupted.

I Love My India

I love how Indians think of India;

how they inherit it like mythology,

fully formed,

umbilical cord still tied to the Indus Valley Civilization,

as if geography were a womb

and not an accident.

How history, conveniently,

begins where kingdoms do, 

as if land needed a crown

to exist.

Not discovered, 

just an immaculate conception, 

like its hundred thousand gods.

Because “discovery” would imply

it was already there,

indifferent,

unbaptized by ambition.

So no, 

not discovery.

Invention.

A retrospective authorship

signed in the names of kings

who never signed the same map.

I love how convenient ignorance

nonchalantly looks aside

when it comes to truths, 

like how

India became India

only when the East India Company

needed a word

large enough

to invoice an entire subcontinent.

Before that, 

all it ever was —

fragments with egos:

Marathas,

Rajputs,

Sultanates;

kingdoms that fought each other

with more consistency

than they ever fought an “invader.”

Too many sovereignties

to be reduced

into a single pronoun.

And yet, 

we speak of unity

in hindsight,

like historians

with editing privileges.

I love how invasions are narrated

as theological disagreements.

As if the Mughal Empire,

the Portuguese,

the French,

and every other flag

arrived here

to correct how we kneel.

Not to extract.

Not to own.

Just overwrite faith.

I love how kingdoms and countries,

dynasties and democracies,

are shuffled together

like synonyms, 

as if power doesn’t change

just because its costume does.

I love how patriotism

arrives before the nation, 

how loyalty is demanded

retroactively,

like tax.

How blindfolds are branded

as culture.

How obedience is renamed

as pride.

How slavery,

with enough rephrasing,

earns itself a flag.

And I love, 

more than anything, 

how the idea of India,

to an Indian,

isn’t memory,

or history,

or even delusion, 

but a carefully curated hallucination

where contradictions don’t conflict;

they pass for truth, 

because nobody insists

on noticing the difference.

The silence

in the gouged out eyes of disagreement, 

it’s easy to call that unity.

And united we are,

as siblings in a family crime;

not because we agree,

but because we’ve learned

disagreement

is bad for inheritance.

Now, repeat after me,

“India is my country

and all Indians are my brothers and sisters.”

Say it slowly.

Feel how easily

belonging

settles into your mouth

like something rehearsed.

And notice, 

how it survives

by making disagreement

feel like betrayal.

How To Believe In Everything At Once

My father is a closeted Communist,

because every hypocrisy

needs a warm blanket to sleep in.

My mother is a maniacally religious woman,

the kind who builds thrones

and air-conditioned rooms

for seven days of seventeen gods,

because what good is a marriage

that doesn’t look like

a well-lit contradiction?

They both speak Bengali.

And yet,

they breathe in completely different metaphors.

My father is a Bengali bhodrolok, you see.

A middle-class man

who traded sweat for money

long enough

to upgrade himself

into debating the evils of capitalism.

That, in Bengal,

is intellectual consistency.

He wrote protest poetry,

denounced systems,

quoted revolution, 

and then came home

to a house built by the same machinery

he claimed to despise.

But that’s the privilege of ideology;

it doesn’t need to be lived.

It just needs to be spoken well.

My mother, meanwhile,

never forgot to believe.

Only what to believe in.

Gods, rituals, birth charts:

faith, outsourced to instruction manuals.

Somewhere along the marriage,

they met in the middle.

He became a god-fearing Communist

who called himself agnostic

while wearing every gemstone she prescribed.

She became a religious woman

who forgot the difference

between devotion and habit,

but remembered

which symbol on the ballot

kept the household peaceful.

You’d call it compatibility.

I call it

parasitic symmetry;

two systems feeding off each other

while pretending to stand.

And I grew up there, 

in that negotiated confusion, 

being told

that true intellect

lies at the intersection.

So Marx said religion is opium.

My father said Marx was right.

Then wore protection against Saturn.

Because belief, in this house,

was never about conviction.

It was about convenience

with vocabulary.

The Communists ruled Bengal

for thirty-four summers.

An impressive run

for an ideology

that wasn’t supposed to believe in thrones.

But then, 

what good is any belief system

if it doesn’t eventually want

a chair?

It’s funny when atheists become gods.

Funnier

when they demand worship

from people who once stood beside them.

The kingdom fell, eventually.

They always do.

But ideologies, 

they don’t collapse.

They mutate.

The ones who bled red

learned to bleed green,

then orange,

then whatever colour

keeps them employable

every five years.

Because survival,

in politics,

is not about spine.

It’s about skin.

They call themselves changemakers.

Kingmakers.

Voices of the people.

But every lunatic

is coherent

inside their own echo.

“If people wanted change,” they say.

If you paint red shit green,

then orange, 

it doesn’t become transformation.

It becomes decoration.

Because colour is cosmetic.

Rot isn’t.

What’s orange today

was green yesterday,

red the day before.

And what you dye yourself into

has very little to do

with what you are.

As a Bengali,

I trust Bengalis less;

Bengali Communists lesser. 

As a witness to ideologies,

I trust believers the least.

And as a tax-paying Indian,

I look at governments

the same way I look at commodes:

same shit, different assholes.

Scavenger Hunt (Unhinged Version)

"Voices like him don't deserve to be heard" she said, 

her larynx quivering, her epiglottis choking on blank air

and yet somehow, her voice, firmly unwavered, domineering. 

You'd think, that sounds fascist for someone who writes liberal as their middle name, all capital letters

but is it even a revolution worth its salt, if a revolutionary can't even sell out, these days?

It's a capitalist world overdue on inflation, 

and rebellions can't get a good night's sleep with bile gurgling in empty stomachs.

It's really paradoxical, the life a woman who ushers onto her shoulders, the searing gravity of championing for feminist causes.

And so, here she was, her fingers nibbling for vengeance 

from a man who she had put on trial, months ago

because "guilty or not" isn't acceptable plausibility when you're out for blood, 

and you can't stop short of a bloodbath, when a man dares to come by with questions. 

I mean, how dare he? 

He has a penis, and that should be enough to shame him out of his existence for as long he breathes, 

but apparently some men do not take empty words for verdicts.

But vengeance knows better;

shame them until they crumble and cave in, like vermins caught in a landslide.

Shame doesn't need logic, reason, grammar or math;

shame is parasitic: it creeps in unnoticed and by the time you realise a shadow existence, it's in your hypothalamus

You are still you, 

only in skin and bone though.

Gather enough of them, and you're looking at a graveyard, 

and what better than the sight of death for eyes that have grown contempt for eyelashes, 

put on some black mascara,

call it redemption, call it reclamation, call it as you please, 

and dare they question your appetite for words, shame them until they don't.

Death is food for vultures. 

And vultures gather in flocks;

you don't move long enough, 

and they peck their crooked beaks into your straightened arteries.

Vultures often mistake indifference for surrender.

But then, every once in a while comes along a man, unperturbed

his ashen face reluctant to be stained in sin or shame,

his spine too uptight to be food for scavengers.

The man on trial now, was one of them. 

Trial not by fire, not by justice, not by combat; it's trial by humiliation.

She gathers her sisters, for folklores need plurality, to be mistaken for facts

and it's facts that make a revolution walk, facts misconceived, but facts nevertheless.

They walk from door to door, telling tales of his grave injustice, 

tales of his disobedience, of his disrespect, 

tales of a deeply misogynistic man, 

because, what do you mean misogyny refers to an inherent hatred or contempt for women, 

misogyny is anything and everything male that doesn't agree to anything and everything female speaks of all of female and of male, and even the in-betweens, 

for male privilege requires mouths to be sewn shut and ears to be the sole functional sense organ, until it's a head nodding in agreement, 

and dare you question the grammar, you're a misogynist too. 

And misogyny is a crime far more horrendous than women slaughtering man and child;

in the land of the lawless, it's often the loudest wails that sit atop the throne of convenient morality, 

and wailing vultures are often louder than howling wolves.

"I will avenge my sisters" she hisses, 

as their dead skins droop from between her teeth fangs. 

It is important for the suffering to continue suffering

so cooked up rebels can serve martyrdom on silverware.

Corruption can sell cannibalism for culinary choice.

Scavenger Hunt (Alternative Version)

“Voices like him don’t deserve to be heard,” she said,

her larynx quivering, her epiglottis choking on blank air, 

and yet somehow,

her voice, firmly unwavered, domineering.

Paradox is generous that way;

it lets censorship masquerade as courage

as long as it borrows the right vocabulary.

You’d think that sounds fascist

for someone who spells liberal

in all capital letters across their chest,

but then, 

what’s the point of a revolution

if it can’t be rented out?

It’s a capitalist world,

and even outrage needs commerce.

Bile doesn’t gurgle well

on an empty stomach.

So here she was,

not alone, never alone, 

her fingers nibbling for vengeance

on a man she had already put on trial

months ago.

Because “guilty or not”

is an administrative inconvenience

when the verdict

has already found its audience.

And audiences, 

they don’t come for truth.

They come for theatre.

He had questions.

That was his first mistake.

The second

was assuming questions

require answers.

He had a spine.

That was unforgivable.

The rest

was just process.

Shame doesn’t need logic.

It doesn’t wait for reason,

doesn’t queue up behind grammar

or knock on the door of math.

Shame is parasitic.

It enters quietly;

a passing whisper,

a casual insinuation, 

and by the time you locate its origin,

it has already rewritten your hypothalamus.

You are still you —

technically.

Skin. Bone.

A functioning silhouette.

But gather enough whispers

and you begin to resemble

a graveyard

that forgot to die properly.

And what better sight for eyes

that have grown contempt for eyelashes?

Dress it up.

Black mascara.

Call it reclamation.

Call it resistance.

Call it whatever helps you

sleep through the echo.

And if anyone dares question

the appetite, 

you don’t answer.

You multiply.

Because vultures don’t hunt alone.

They gather.

They circle.

They inherit altitude

and call it perspective.

Stand still long enough

and they will mistake

your refusal

for surrender.

Peck.

Probe.

Persist.

Not out of hunger, 

but certainty.

Certainty is the sharpest beak.

Every once in a while, though,

a man refuses to rot on cue.

Ashen,

but not stained.

Silent,

but not submissive.

A spine

that does not recognise

the authority of noise.

The man on trial

was one of them.

Not trial by fire.

Not trial by fact.

Not even trial by conflict.

Trial by humiliation.

Because humiliation scales.

It travels faster than evidence.

And it leaves no fingerprints

on the hands that distribute it.

She gathered her voices;

not sisters, not allies, 

voices.

Because plurality

is the easiest way

to counterfeit truth.

Repeat a wound often enough,

and it stops needing a body.

Repeat an accusation often enough,

and it starts resembling memory.

And somewhere in that repetition,

words learn how to trade utilities:

“I will avenge my sisters.”

It travels well.

Clean.

Complete.

Unburdened by detail.

It doesn’t need context.

Context slows things down.

It doesn’t need bodies.

Bodies complicate ownership.

So it travels by repetition:

polished by distance,

strengthened by echo,

until it no longer belongs

to grief,

only to its performance.

They moved:

door to door,

tongue to tongue;

telling stories

of his disrespect,

his defiance,

his disobedience.

Misogyny, they named it.

Because words,

once emptied of definition,

and hollowed of meaning, 

become containers.

And containers, 

you can fill with anything.

Disgust.

Hatred.

Rage.

All of it fits.

And once it fits, 

it convicts.

In a land allergic to evidence,

volume becomes virtue.

The loudest wail

earns the cleanest halo.

And halos, 

like everything else, 

are easier to manufacture

than to deserve.

Death, after all,

is food for vultures.

But shame, 

shame is cultivation.

You don’t kill the body.

You salt the soil.

Make sure nothing grows again;

not doubt,

not dissent,

and most importantly, 

never the audacity

to ask “why.”

Scavenger Hunt

“Voices like him don’t deserve to be heard,” she said,

her larynx quivering, her epiglottis choking on blank air, 

and yet somehow,

her voice, firmly unwavered, domineering.

Paradox is generous that way;

it lets censorship masquerade as courage

as long as it borrows the right vocabulary.

You’d think that sounds fascist

for someone who spells liberal

in all capital letters across their chest,

but then, 

what’s the point of a revolution

if it can’t be rented out?

It’s a capitalist world,

and even outrage needs commerce.

Bile doesn’t gurgle well

on an empty stomach.

So here she was,

not alone, never alone, 

her fingers nibbling for vengeance

on a man she had already put on trial

months ago.

Because “guilty or not”

is an administrative inconvenience

when the verdict

has already found its audience.

And audiences, 

they don’t come for truth.

They come for theatre.

He had questions.

That was his first mistake.

The second

was assuming questions

require answers.

He had a spine.

That was unforgivable.

The rest

was just process.

Shame doesn’t need logic.

It doesn’t wait for reason,

doesn’t queue up behind grammar

or knock on the door of math.

Shame is parasitic.

It enters quietly;

a passing whisper,

a casual insinuation, 

and by the time you locate its origin,

it has already rewritten your hypothalamus.

You are still you —

technically.

Skin. Bone.

A functioning silhouette.

But gather enough whispers

and you begin to resemble

a graveyard

that forgot to die properly.

And what better sight for eyes

that have grown contempt for eyelashes?

Dress it up.

Black mascara.

Call it reclamation.

Call it resistance.

Call it whatever helps you

sleep through the echo.

And if anyone dares question

the appetite, 

you don’t answer.

You multiply.

Because vultures don’t hunt alone.

They gather.

They circle.

They inherit altitude

and call it perspective.

Stand still long enough

and they will mistake

your refusal

for surrender.

Peck.

Probe.

Persist.

Not out of hunger, 

but certainty.

Certainty is the sharpest beak.

Every once in a while, though,

a man refuses to rot on cue.

Ashen,

but not stained.

Silent,

but not submissive.

A spine

that does not recognise

the authority of noise.

The man on trial

was one of them.

Not trial by fire.

Not trial by fact.

Not even trial by conflict.

Trial by humiliation.

Because humiliation scales.

It travels faster than evidence.

And it leaves no fingerprints

on the hands that distribute it.

She gathered her voices;

not sisters, not allies, 

voices.

Because plurality

is the easiest way

to counterfeit truth.

Repeat a wound often enough,

and it stops needing a body.

Repeat an accusation often enough,

and it starts resembling memory.

They moved:

door to door,

tongue to tongue;

telling stories

of his disrespect,

his defiance,

his disobedience.

Misogyny, they named it.

Because words,

once emptied of definition,

and hollowed of meaning, 

become containers.

And containers, 

you can fill with anything.

Disgust.

Hatred.

Rage.

All of it fits.

And once it fits, 

it convicts.

In a land allergic to evidence,

volume becomes virtue.

The loudest wail

earns the cleanest halo.

And halos, 

like everything else, 

are easier to manufacture

than to deserve.

Death, after all,

is food for vultures.

But shame, 

shame is cultivation.

You don’t kill the body.

You salt the soil.

Make sure nothing grows again;

not doubt,

not dissent,

and most importantly, 

never the audacity

to ask “why.”

A Beginner's Guide To Gardening

There stands an orchard

somewhere amidst nowhere,

that believes in fairness.

Not the old kind;

no blindfolds, no scales,

nor the inconvenience of being consistent.

No.

This one has evolved.

It remembers selectively.

It feels strategically.

It has gardeners:

trained, articulate,

excellent at explaining weather

to people who have never been wet.

Fruits don’t fall here.

Let’s not insult intelligence.

They are assigned gravity.

A ripe one?

Heavier;

if its lineage reads well on paper.

A rotten one?

Lighter;

if its fall makes things awkward.

Balance, they say,

isn’t about weight.

It is about relevance, 

and relevance, 

let’s not pretend, 

is just a leaky gland with a better dictionary.

There came a storm once,

upon this orchard.

Not cinematic.

Quiet. Contagious.

The inherited kind.

Branches snapped.

Roots drowned.

Fruits fell like overdue honesty.

And the orchard, 

efficient as ever, 

did what it always does

when reality becomes unavoidable.

It agreed.

“Yes. This is real.

Yes. This matters.

Yes. We should have noticed sooner.”

Beautiful.

Timely.

Functionally useless.

And then, because irony has impeccable timing, 

a single fruit fell

on a clean afternoon.

No wind.

No warning.

No convenient backstory.

Just gravity;

temporarily unemployed.

It hit.

And where it touched, 

it didn’t bruise.

It engraved.

The tree darkened.

The air shifted.

Even silence stopped pretending it wasn't biased.

“What happened?”

you asked.

And the fruit, 

because lies love a well-lit stage, 

said:

“I chose to fall.”

Now, here's where things get uncomfortable.

Storms don’t choose.

People do.

And people

love choice

when it protects them

and context

when it excuses them.

You paused.

Not out of confusion.

Out of recognition.

Because this, 

this wasn’t rain.

It wouldn’t repeat.

Wouldn’t organise itself

into a pattern you could study

without consequence.

This was intent

wearing tragedy like a chameleon skin.

And that, 

doesn’t sit well in frameworks.

So you adjusted.

Not enough to deny the mark,

that would be indecent.

Just enough

to dilute consequence

into conversation.

You called it anomaly.

You called it nuance.

You called it complex.

You called it everything

except what it was.

Because naming it

means forfeiting control

over what comes next.

And control, 

is the only thing

your fairness has ever been fair about.

The tree stood there.

Alive, 

on a technicality.

Trusted, 

not that it mattered.

Trust is soft.

Doesn’t photograph well.

So you moved on.

And the fruit?

Gone.

Returned to the soil

like accountability always does

when the ecosystem is curated.

Seasons passed.

Storms came.

Storms went.

And you;

you got better

at recognising rain.

Stories for skeletons.

Language for flesh.

Loud microphones and anticipatory applauses for skin.

But something else grew alongside.

Quietly.

Efficiently.

Predictably.

A math.

Not of storms, 

but of choices

learning how to cosplay as them.

A sapling, 

young enough to still believe

questions aren’t punished, 

asked:

“If a storm breaks a branch,

and a fruit chooses

to break one the same way, 

why do we fix them differently?”

You didn’t answer.

Of course you didn’t.

Because answering

requires admitting

the one thing

your entire orchard is allergic to:

That fire, 

whether invited by sky

or delivered by hand, 

does not check intent

before it burns.

That the tree

doesn’t heal differently.

Only the story does.

And stories, 

you’ve industrialised those.

So you kept voting on gravity.

This fall: natural.

That fall: negotiable.

This one: tragic.

That one: circumstantial.

Until the sky filled up.

Not with storms.

With fruits.

Waiting.

Watching.

Learning

how to fall

in ways

you’d forgive.

And here’s the part

you’ll hate;

not because it’s wrong,

but because it’s familiar:

You built this orchard.

Not alone, 

relax.

But you maintain it.

Every hesitation.

Every softening.

Every better story

chosen over a harder truth.

You are there.

In the soil.

In the scale.

In the edits

you pretend are ethics.

One day,

there will be no storms left

to blame.

No history

to outsource guilt to.

No patterns

to hide behind.

Just a sky

full of things

choosing

exactly

how they fall.

And you, 

with all your nuance,

your care,

your elegantly worded restraint, 

will still not have learned

the only law

you broke first:

A fall

doesn’t become lighter

because you agreed

to understand it.