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.
