Blurb:
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 breath-taking 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 irreverent 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.
How much of our personalities are innate, and how much is hastily slapped together in the wake of childhood crises
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.18
All that discomfort and pain — just an incapability of processing the world as it really is.
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.19
And so, I’d lie often and flamboyantly . I’d keep transferring and projecting all my emotions on to physical manifestations because it felt like I could finally translate one pain into another that the world would understand – or, at least, take seriously.
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.33
We’re all unreliable narrators, because narration is unreliable. They shift and squirm and thrum under your fingers, mould meaning into a thousand ways, waiting to be whatever it is the listener is open to receiving.
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.33
Love was also two people in a well-meaning relationship experiencing two very different things, out of sync.
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.47
In a while, you’ll have turned so many pages across so many genres and mediums, that the act of reading gets under your fingernails, your skin, the message in your synapses, between your neurons, until it is muscle memory, something deep inside of you, green and gnostic.
You’re always reading. It’s who you are.
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.58
Racism, sexism and other institutionalized systemic expressions, all wield this idea that you’re simply overimagining slights, hyper-focusing on unintentional micro-aggressions and that we could all get along if you could just give humanism a chance.
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.61
Over millennia, what women have been articulating as intuition or gut feeling is the power of reading – reading rooms, reading situations, the crowd, a group of men in an unlit alley at night, potential violence.
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.61
They say a life filled with love necessarily involves a life filled with the fear of that love’s loss.
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.106
Did I feel a sense of homecoming? My old circuitry alive, here with the people I loved in the spaces that I had loved them in. Or did I now feel disoriented being in those spaces, which had seemed so much more expansive in my memories?
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.121
How else do you explain the grandeur and delusion in assuming that people will be unable to carry on without you?
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.123
What is it that we seek when we travel to a new city? Is it the rush of heading into an unknown experience? Is it the physical validation of having researched that experience for months first? Is it the joy of learning things around you and about you? How important is it in each of these factors, that you be the first to do so?
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.129
Here we both were, the cherry blossom flower and I, alien and temporary to the landscape, capable of generating and experiencing so much joy. It is here that I feel both grounded and weightless in measures that feel right.
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.184
There are two seasons to everything: change and the threat of it.
The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, P.185
