Belarusian author Vlada Marsh’s memoir, It’s Not Scary to Be Alone: How to Start a New Life after a Breakup, grew out of her experience of divorce, healing, and rebuilding her life in Georgia. Here, she tells the story of how an unexpected connection with India, from strangers at a book launch in Tbilisi to a wedding in Kerala and a chance encounter with an Indian publisher, led her to publish the book’s first English edition in India.
When Vlada first told her friends she was going to publish her book in India, they couldn’t understand it.
“India? But what’s her connection to India?” they kept asking. “She was born in Belarus, lived in Georgia, and was preparing to move to France… Why India?”
To every one of them, the answer was surprisingly simple: India had already become part of her story.
In fairness, there wasn’t much logic behind her decision. She followed her heart and the deep connection she had felt with the country after visiting Kerala in 2025. During that trip, she stayed by the Indian Ocean, made new friends, immersed herself in a culture completely different from anything she’d ever known, and worked on the English translation of her book.
But before going any further, let’s rewind a little…
The Story Behind the Book
Vlada moved to Georgia with her son and then-husband at the end of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. Within a few months, almost everything in her life began falling apart.
Her husband and she separated after ten years of marriage and eventually divorced. She went through one of the most difficult periods in her relationship with her mother. And then she suffered the death of her grandfather, soon followed by that of her father.
She had to start building her life again almost from scratch.
There were moments when she felt alone, and that she could rely on no one but herself. At the same time, she was responsible for her son, who was only seven. It brought her the kind of exhaustion that is difficult to explain until you have experienced it yourself: she had almost no emotional strength left, but giving up simply wasn’t an option. Every morning, she got up and kept doing what needed to be done, even when she didn’t feel like doing anything at all.
Writing had always helped her understand herself, so on her blog she began sharing what she was going through. She expected that doing so would help her process her own experiences. What she didn’t expect was how many people would recognize themselves in them.
Readers wrote to her about relationship crises, divorces, breakups and the grief that followed them. Again and again, she heard about the same fears: being judged, ending up alone, making the wrong decision and, perhaps most painfully, feeling trapped inside a relationship.
At that time, she began therapy and started writing even more openly.
Eventually, she received so many messages from her followers encouraging her to write a book that she realized the time had come.
The process of writing became part of her healing. It helped her to understand her own patterns and traumas, rebuild her faith and, eventually, feel genuinely happy and fulfilled.
Her book, It’s Not Scary to Be Alone: How to Start a New Life after a Breakup, was first published in Russian in 2024. She presented it to readers in Minsk and Tbilisi. And that was when the story took an unpredictable Indian turn.
Four Unexpected Guests from Bangalore
At her first book presentation in Tbilisi, four unsuspecting Indian tourists randomly walked in from the street. They had rightly noticed that something interesting was happening and decided to come inside. They were on vacation from Bangalore.
The topic of the book immediately aroused their interest. They started talking, and one of them even insisted that she had seen Vlada’s poster somewhere at the airport. There was no such poster, but she was so certain that Vlada started to wonder. She certainly loved the idea.
At the time, Vlada treated it as a funny and lovely coincidence. She had no idea that about six months later, she would be in India herself.
So Even in India, There Is No Universal Recipe for Happiness?
In the summer of 2025, Vlada’s Indian friend Aakash Nambiar came to visit her in Tbilisi. They had originally met in Dubai running barefoot together (which is a separate story in its own right) and over time they had developed a close friendship.
One day, while hiking in the hills above Tbilisi, they started talking about relationships, marriage and the differences between European and Indian culture. Vlada was particularly curious about India because she had read that divorce rates there were very low.
“Does that mean Indian people are better at building long-term relationships?” she asked.
Aakash explained that things were much more complicated. Many marriages were traditionally arranged by families, he told her, and divorce could carry enormous social and family pressure, particularly for women.
A low divorce rate, he outlined, didn’t necessarily mean that every marriage was happy.
The insight fascinated her. They were from completely different cultures, yet they seemed to have exactly the same fundamental questions.
“How do we choose the right person? How much should we compromise? When should we stay, and when should we leave? How do we distinguish love from attachment, expectations or fear?”
“So even in India, there is no universal recipe for happiness?” she quipped.
“Nowhere,” Aakash smiled.
“So what should a wise woman do?” she asked, almost in despair.
“Don’t rush. Give yourself time. Get to know the person. Listen to your heart. Sometimes women trust the first feelings of chemistry and affection and think they’re enough to make a choice. But deeper incompatibilities can appear later. Take a year, two — however long you need to understand whether this is really the person you want to walk through life with.”
“Two years? And what if after two years I realize he’s not the one?”
“Then you’ll know.”
“But I’ll have lost two years.”
“Time will pass anyway.”
Vlada remembered falling silent after that.
If he was right, it meant there was no place on Earth where people didn’t have to learn how to love.
At some point during their conversation, Vlada told Aakash how wonderful she found Indian weddings and how much she would love to experience one someday.
Neither of them knew how soon that would actually happen.
An Invitation to Kerala
A few months later, Aakash sent her a message. His niece was getting married in Kerala. He had been invited, and because he remembered how curious she was about Indian weddings and how much she wanted to visit India, he offered to bring her along.
“If you go, I’ll definitely go too,” he told her.
At first, Vlada thought he was joking. But before she knew it, she had applied for an Indian visa and booked flights.
“Was she really doing this?”
She was flying to Kerala for an Indian wedding with thousands of guests, despite having a mild phobia of crowds.
It was definitely going to be something entirely new for her.
A Wedding for Love
During her first moments in Kerala, Vlada was overwhelmed. Everything seemed brighter, louder and faster, as though someone had turned the intensity of all her senses up to the maximum. Music. The smell of spices. Tropical greenery. Flowers. Colorful sarees. Rickshaws flying through traffic.
She felt as though she had walked into a Mollywood movie.
They arrived at the family’s village, surrounded by tropical fruit trees, with music drifting from a nearby temple. Aakash’s mother welcomed her warmly and cooked her delicious specialities for them. Soon she was meeting relatives everywhere, and again and again she was struck by how naturally welcoming the people were.
She was a foreigner who had appeared at their family celebration from thousands of kilometers away, but she never felt like an outsider.
And then there was the wedding itself. To her surprise, it turned out that this wasn’t an arranged marriage.
The bride and groom had met while studying in Bangalore and fallen in love. Their backgrounds were different, and initially their choice wasn’t an easy one for the bride’s family to accept. Eventually, they pledged their support.
After all the conversations Aakash and Vlada had had in Georgia about arranged marriages, family expectations, love and personal choice, there was something especially touching about finding herself at such a wedding.
And when she saw the couple together, she understood immediately.
“You could see it.”
She watched the way they looked at each other, held hands and smiled. She saw how genuinely happy they were when the groom arrived at the ceremony at the temple. She saw the bride worrying in that sweet way people do when someone means the world to them.
They weren’t simply putting on a performance of happiness for thousands of wedding guests. They were genuinely happy to have chosen each other.
She felt deeply touched.
Perhaps she had traveled all that way expecting to observe an Indian wedding as something exotic and culturally different. Yet, she found herself witnessing something completely familiar: two people in love.
Four days of dancing followed, along with hundreds of relatives, thousands of guests, religious ceremonies, traditional feasts, music, colors and emotions.
It was overwhelming. And unforgettable.
Translating My Book by the Indian Ocean
After the wedding, Vlada went to the seaside to rest and continue working on the English translation of her book. She stayed near the Indian Ocean, at a small resort called SeaShell, and spent her days translating a story that had begun during the darkest period of her life.
There was something surreal about it. A book about divorce, loneliness, rebuilding yourself and learning to trust life again had traveled with her all the way from Georgia to Kerala. And life around her kept moving.
She made new friends. With Shijin, the son of the hotel owner, they experimented with turning her sarees into beautiful dresses and created videos about Kerala. She talked to people whose lives looked completely different from hers and yet often felt surprisingly easy to understand.
The more time she spent there, the more she thought about how different their lives can look on the surface while the things they want underneath are remarkably similar.
They want to love and be loved.
They want to feel safe.
They want to belong.
They want someone to understand them.
A Blessing I Didn’t Yet Understand
One day, Aakash wanted to show Vlada a Ganesha temple. They arrived later than planned because they had been waiting for his uncle, and by coincidence they arrived during a ceremony. She hadn’t expected anything in particular from the visit. But during worship, she felt an extraordinary sense of energy and peace. The pujaris gave her two blessings from Krishna and Ganesha.
At the time, she didn’t fully understand what the experience meant to her. She only remembered leaving with the strong feeling that somehow it represented a new beginning.
But the idea of publishing her book in India still hadn’t crossed her mind. That thought came months later.
Why Don’t You Publish It in India?
She was already back home and approaching the end of her work on the English version when, one day, she went for a walk and found herself thinking about what to do with the manuscript.
At that exact moment, she received a message from the bride whose wedding she had attended in Kerala. She wanted to ask her something about Georgia.
And while Vlada responded politely, a completely unexpected thought flashed into her mind:
“Why don’t you try publishing the book in India?”
The thought was so sudden and clear that, in that moment, it felt almost like an answer from God.
“Are you kidding? How could that possibly work?” she thought.
The answer came almost immediately:
“You went to an Indian wedding without really knowing where you were going, and that turned out beautifully. Just take the next step.”
So she did.
When she got home, she opened LinkedIn and started searching for Indian publishers.
She had no contacts in Indian publishing, no strategy and no idea whether anyone would be interested.
All she had was a very strong feeling that it was worth trying.
Finding My Publisher in India
That search eventually led her to Divya Trivedi and SGSH Publications.
Divya was interested in the topic of her book, and they agreed that once the English manuscript was ready, Vlada would send it to her.
She kept her promise.
What convinced her to work with Divya wasn’t exactly a sugar-coated sales pitch. Divya was honest about what she could and couldn’t promise. Vlada asked a lot of questions, and even when an honest answer could potentially have made her reconsider working with her, she gave it anyway. Vlada never felt that her priority was simply to sell her the most expensive publishing services package.
For Vlada, her honesty created trust. And trust has always mattered to her more than promises of perfection.
Then, during one of their conversations, Divya mentioned Ganesha. She told Vlada that she comes from a Gujarati Brahmin family and that before an important new beginning, her family traditionally says:
“Jai Shree Ganesh.”
Memories of the temple in Kerala came flooding back. For Vlada, the circle suddenly felt complete.
She thought again about the symbolism she had associated with the blessings she received there: Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, and Krishna, whom she connected with love.
Someone may call these things coincidences. Someone may call them intuition, faith, synchronicity or simply the human tendency to find meaning in events.
For her, the message was simple:
“Keep going.”
So Why India?
Maybe because this book was never really only about divorce. It was about learning to trust life again after the life she had planned disappeared.
That journey began in Belarus, took her to the Czech Republic, broke open in Georgia, and continued through therapy, loss, new relationships, countries, and versions of herself she hadn’t known before.
Somewhere along the way, India became part of it too, not because she planned it, but because of the people she met there.
She’d spent much of her professional life working in communication, and much of her personal writing trying to understand relationships. The longer she did both, the more convinced she became that they were really about the same thing:
“Our need to be seen, heard and understood.”
People may speak different languages, pray differently, build families differently and grow up thousands of kilometers apart.
But love doesn’t need to be translated. Neither do grief, fear, hope, loneliness, or the desire to belong.
She was born in Belarus, but crossing cultures had been part of her life since childhood, when she spent time living with a Spanish family. Later, she studied in the Czech Republic, rebuilt her life in Georgia, and found another source of inspiration in France. She translated parts of this book beside the Indian Ocean. And now the English edition of a book born during one of the most difficult periods of her life is being published in India for readers around the world.
When she started writing it, she thought she was documenting the end of something. Years later, she understood that she was writing about new beginnings.
And what better place to start than India?
Get Your Copy Now:
- SGSH E-Store: https://sgshpublications.com/product/its-not-scary-to-be-alone/
- Amazon India Paperback: https://amzn.in/d/05l2SlfT
Follow her on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vladamarsh
