People are like onions, with layers of personality. But their conversations are usually about the topmost layers alone: the job they’re doing, their hobbies in their free time, the food they’re interested in. Take away those layers, and we have the core of the person. It’s something that isn’t exposed too often because it’s sensitive to light. But Shruti Buddhavarapu takes the plunge. In her memoir The Weight of a Cherry Blossom, she lets us peer into her inner self.
Her connections to her family, her sickness which is often ignored in public discourse, the mortality of her near and dear, the modern loneliness of perpetually shifting homes—all are covered in detail. In the process, we learn to know her better than our own family. Shruti starts with her earliest memories of how her family fits together. What were her parents’ childhoods like, and how did their respective families affect their natures? As is typical in upwardly mobile India, her extended family spreads across states and languages, creating a broad swathe of influences, a fertile soil for Shruti to blossom in. Her enthusiastic adoption of books and stories further enriches her.
The narrative moves to Shruti’s discovery of her body’s fragility: she suffers from PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome), a disorder prevalent in nearly a fifth of Indian women, but not discussed as frequently as it should be. The disorder affects her periods and her metabolism besides making physical intimacy difficult. She speaks of her experience, living with it, and the embarrassment of consulting doctors with almost-Victorian attitudes (“having an affair” becoming a euphemism for sex).
Death looms large over her, as she loses her grandparents over a relatively short time, and her mother is admitted to the ICU. She’s been close to her grandparents, seeing how her grandmother handles her husband’s death and eventually passes away herself. The incidents remind her of her own friends, taken from the world too soon. People are there one day, gone the next—her thoughts spur her to cherish them all the more.
Finally, the last section (but there is no real chronological order in which this book must be read) speaks of the unbearable lightness of the travelling being. Like many others in this age, Shruti has made multiple homes through her life. Although each of these places holds space in her heart, it is hard to say where exactly she feels she “belongs”. Her friends alone remain as markers of the places she’s lived in, but they too move on in time. Like the titular cherry blossom, she is blown by life to the next destination.
Sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes startlingly familiar, this is a chronicle of the soul in the modern Indian era.