Since the time my senses began to support my being, I had been an observer and a participant to the ancestral 'Laxmi-Alaxmi Puja' annually organized during Diwali Amavasya (the day of the new moon during Diwali) in our household. I was told that my grandmother entrusted my mother with the rituals since her marriage to the Basu household. And, my mother kept her word till the year she died making sure that all the rituals are religiously followed. In the later years of her life, she used to get worried that the puja might end with her although everytime I assured her that she need not worry as we can handle the responsibility equally well. On her last year, she was contented with the way we - my brother, sister-in-law and I organised the puja. What I could not tell her was that I have secretly been an atheist-agonostic like my father and learnt to keep this choice of mine a secret in the little world of mine from my father himself. He never used to brag about his beliefs in atheism and hurt other God-believers. This secret of mine might have hurt her.
Like my father, I am simply concerned about taking care of what she had left with us - our roots, our family traditions and the religious rituals. The religious rituals which we follow during this worship is logically unappealing to me. I do not feel any arousal of respect within me for the family deity but this puja makes me bow down my head for my parents - one devoutly dedicated to theism who chose to follow all the ancestral rituals perfectly, and another, a dedicated atheist-agnostic, who supported her in her followed path.