The Weight of a Cherry Blossom

Category Non-Fiction
Format Paperback
Imprint Rupa
Price 295

ISBN: 978-93-5333-699-8
Pages: 208 pages
Date: 1st November 2019

ABOUT THIS BOOK

If you took a map and pinned each city I’ve lived in, I’d exist somewhere in the tautness of the string attaching one point to the other.

If a life is lived across many homes—from balmy Chennai to muggy Mumbai, the crackling expansiveness of Delhi to the breathtaking splendour of Vancouver in spring—where do you truly belong? If you are constantly on the move, is home just what Customs can clear? And how do you find love, in the middle of it all, when you do not or cannot stay in one city long enough?

Funny, poignant and reflective, The Weight of a Cherry Blossom is a fable of rootlessness and belonging in the modern world. It is equal parts a story of urban loneliness and self-discovery, and of the healing powers of kinship and love. Revisiting the awkwardness of adolescence and the chaos of growing up, it looks the foibles of adulthood irreverently in the eye.

Tracing the powerful patterns of family, friendship, storytelling, fear, love and loss from her childhood to the teetering end of her twenties, Shruti Buddhavarapu takes you through the embarrassing yet affirming adventures of a life lived with one’s heart on one’s sleeve—through illness, despair and joy.

AUTHOR OF THE BOOK

Shruti Buddhavarapu is a poet, writer and editor currently living in New Delhi. She has a double masters from Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of British Columbia. She is fascinated with politics, pop culture and how seamlessly one bleeds into the other. She is also a researcher with an interest in the rhetoric of health and medicine. Her first book, Mother Steals a Bicycle and Other Stories was co-authored with Salai Selvam.