Suswati Basu – A Poetic Testament to Resilience and Adaptation
Suswati Basu’s contribution to the 52 for 26 poetry project – Hide and Seek – is a piece that sits quietly at first glance, yet carries a profound emotional resonance. It is a poem shaped not by abstraction but by lived reality — an intimate reflection on what it means to navigate the world when the tools you rely on begin to slip through your fingers.
Basu lives with Hereditary Neuropathy with Liability to Pressure Palsies (HNPP), a rare degenerative neurological condition. For many, such a diagnosis would be an invisible footnote; for Basu, whose life and work revolve around language, meaning, and articulation, it becomes a daily negotiation. Years of anti-epilepsy medication have left her with short-term memory loss — a stealthy, persistent thief that steals words just as she reaches for them.
This is the tension at the heart of her poem: the push and pull between a writer’s instinct to articulate and the neurological realities that interrupt, distort, or dissolve the very language she seeks. Basu’s solution — a word bank kept on her phone — becomes more than a tool. It is a small act of defiance, a way of refusing disappearance, of holding tight to the vocabulary that shapes her world.
The poem captures this fight with a measured tenderness. It does not ask for pity, nor does it collapse into despair. Instead, it charts a steady, thoughtful path through limitation, resilience, and the fragile mechanics of memory. In doing so, Basu invites us to consider how much we take for granted in our own minds: the availability of a phrase, the ease of recall, the stability of meaning.
Her voice — sharp, observant, and unflinchingly honest — enriches the 52 for 26 project with a piece that reminds us that every poem is, at its core, an act of persistence.
Hide and Seek
I once was an esthete of words,
Often lost in a reverie of
Locutions and recondite
Expressions,
A receptacle of idioms.
Until my hippocampus spluttered,
And suddenly my brain
Struggled to utter
Simple phrases
Like chuffed,
Piece of cake,
Or glutton.
Pregabalin,
An emetic medication,
Reminds me of the
Figure of speech,
Paraprosdokian.
What doesn’t kill you
Makes you stronger,
Until you can’t remember
What slayed you in the first place.
The term is camouflaged,
Not quite concealed,
Like an arctic hare
In winter snow,
Hiding from foes.
A lagomorph,
Burrows and freezes,
Slowing its body
As if waiting to
Rouse one day.
Losing a word,
Or a name,
An infuriating void lingers:
An outline without substance,
Almost, but never fully,
Capturing what once lived inside it.
Even as you wrestle
With the dull ache of memory’s failure,
You know exactly
What the forgotten thing is not.
SUSWATI BASU
