‘What about a real job?’ A cancer expert on the reaction to her son’s career choice

Professor Minoti Apte, 64, is a world expert in pancreatic disease at the University of NSW. Her son Tushar, 36, is a LA-based songwriter and record producer.

“In India, when we were growing up, the choice for the bright students was either medicine or engineering.”Credit: Ian Spanier

Minoti: It was clear very early on that Tushar was musical. I do classical Indian dancing and my husband, Vivek, a chemical engineer by profession, is classically trained and sings and plays the harmonium, so there has always been music in the house. Once, my husband was practising a song and Tushar, who was still a baby, crawled over and started singing it – in our mother tongue. Not just singing the actual words and the melody, but also the interlude, the music in between. We couldn’t believe it.

In India, when we were growing up, the choice for the bright students was either medicine or engineering. They were the two status symbols. Here, you don’t have to be pigeonholed like that. Tushar was in year 8 or 9 when he said, “Mum, I’m not going to do medicine or science; I’m going to do music.” So we said, “Okay, as long as you keep up your school grades.” And being Indian parents, we also said it was good to have a bachelor’s degree under your belt!

His success in the US – apparently, his songs have been streamed 1.3 billion times – wouldn’t have happened without persistence. He has an inner strength. He had terrible eczema and asthma growing up but never, ever did I see that boy complain. The eczema was so bad, in year 9 he was hospitalised. The only treatment was to completely “mummify” the patient: slather them with cream and bandage them from head to toe. Even then, he took up a job in the hospital radio station.

In 2007 he had testicular cancer. He didn’t even tell us at first. We had merrily gone off to India for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary and Tushar had stayed in Sydney for a uni exam. We used to call home regularly and he’d say he was fine. Then, the day after the big party, I called and he said, “Actually, Mum, I’ve had this lump for a while and the doctor asked me to get a biopsy.” My heart sank; my flight back was so terrible. Thankfully it was a seminoma, which is a slightly better version, but we had that five-year period of anxiety: a lump in my throat every time I opened his lab results. Now, Tushar and his wife Avanti have a three-month-old baby boy.

“When he went to the US, some of our friends were asking, ‘How come you let him go to do this kind of thing?’”

It’s very unusual for an Indian boy, a brown-skinned boy of brown-skinned parents, to take this [career] path. Even when he went to the US in 2011, some of our friends were asking, “How come you let him go to do this kind of thing? What about a real job?” Now that he has been able to make his way, everybody is very proud of him.

Our biggest disagreement has always been about him being late, late, late. He can also be bad about keeping us informed. Even now, when he’s visiting us in Sydney and he goes out at night, we keep saying, “All we need is for you to tell us when you expect to be home. It doesn’t have to be early, it could be 4am for all we care, just let us know.” It’s so stupid, but I still lie awake waiting for the sound of the car.

Tushar: My mum used to work a lot when I was growing up; I remember thinking she wasn’t home that much. There was a lot of travel and, at day care, I was always the last person to be picked up. There was also a big medical conference overseas every year that fell on my birthday, so she’d usually be away and I would hate that. But even though she was around less in terms of hours, she somehow managed to do most of the traditional mum stuff. I never felt she wasn’t present.

It wasn’t easy for my parents when I said that I wanted to go into music. They’re very supportive now, but there were points of resistance. When I was at Homebush Boys High School [in Sydney’s west], I got a job at the 2000 Olympics. I told my parents I wanted to buy a set of turntables, try DJing, do something cool. That really freaked them out. They were like, “No, we’re not letting you spend your money on those.” I was livid. Then again, I wasn’t necessarily an easy child and there were times when I was acting up, failing school, being an idiot teenager.

“I told my parents I wanted to buy a set of turntables, try DJing, do something cool. That really freaked them out.”

[With the cancer] I knew something was wrong, but I did all the tests on my own before letting them know. I don’t think I realised how serious it was until I told Mum. She stayed very cool; I’m not sure how she actually felt.

The dynamic in our family has always been what I’d call stoic. It’s not like we talk about each other’s feelings and all that. We just do stuff and get on with it. It’s like a different way of showing support and affection. Leading by example and giving you all the tools you need to be resilient and keep going, no matter how many times you get rejected, especially in a cut-throat place like Los Angeles.

There are moments when I notice her stressed about things, like having to spend so much time finding funding. Pancreatic cancer is not very high profile, although Steve Jobs spotlighted it for a while. It must be tough to stay dedicated to work which has such a long tail. She made her breakthrough [discovering pancreatic cancer cells are enabled by stellate, or non-malignant, cells] back in 2004, but it’s only now getting to the stage where new treatments can be trialled.

I probably do have her on a pedestal. My mum is one of those people who’s not just highly intelligent in one thing: she can apply that ability, to zero in and focus, to just about everything. But she’s also able to dial it down, to be empathetic and relatable to everybody.

She can be quite impatient, though, and once she gets an idea in her head, she has to bug you to get that thing done. If I’m sick over here in LA and I’m taking care of it, she’ll still call me to say, “Have you taken this?” “Have you done that?” She’s very persistent, like a woodpecker. Maybe it’s a doctor thing – they know all the possibilities. So she goes to the worst possible one and then works back from there.

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