Sibeswar and Chandana Mukherjee at their home in New Delhi on Tuesday. Picture by Rajesh Kumar

New Delhi, April 19: For the first time in her life, Chandana Mukherjee was woken by a phone ringing at 1am, and the voice of her son on the line from New York stirred some surprise mingled with concern.

In the 22 years that her son, Siddhartha, had been away from home studying, pursuing research, and working, he had never woken them up so close to midnight as he did early Tuesday morning. But Siddhartha, a 40-year old India-born American cancer physician and researcher at Columbia University quickly put Chandana at ease, telling her he had just been named as a winner of the 2011 Pulitzer prize.

Siddhartha has won the Pulitzer prize in general nonfiction for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, that has been described as “a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.” The Pulitzer citation has called it “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite medical treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.”

“He’s always made us so proud,” Chandana said this afternoon in her home in New Delhi where Siddhartha had grown up attending St. Columba’s School, displaying interest in the sciences and talent in painting and school debates.

His parents say they never pushed Siddhartha towards anything and find it difficult to pinpoint what drew him towards biology or medicine. “Maybe it was a book on molecular biology that he received from his uncle when he was in the 10th grade,” said Chandana.

“He scored 1580 on 1600 in the Scholastic Aptitude Test (a tool that many US universities use to select students for undergraduate admissions) and won full scholarships from 10 US universities,” recalls Sibeswar Mukherjee, his father.

Siddhartha chose Stanford where he studied biology — but also painted the outer wall of a large auditorium, his parents said. “He went up to the Dean and said this bare wall needs something — and asked for a ladder and paint equipment,” Chandana said.

“We saw what he had done when we visited him for his convocation — the wall had bright colours, musical instruments — a piano, a harmonium, a flute, a violin, a sitar — giant-sized paintings but in just the right ratio of sizes,” she said.

After Stanford, Siddhartha earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University where he studied immunology, and then moved to Harvard Medical School, before joining the Dana Farber Cancer Centre and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

His encounters with cancer patients there drew him towards exploring the science and the long history of cancer. In his book’s prologue, Siddhartha says that the book grew out of an attempt to answer questions that occurred — “How old is cancer? What are the roots of our battle against this disease? ... Where are we in the war on cancer? Is there an end? Can this war even be won?”

“We always expected that he’s going to achieve a lot,” Chandana said this evening after a telephonic conversation with Siddhartha’s wife, Sarah Sze, who is a contemporary artist and sculptor and MacArthur Fellow, and whose works have been displayed in several countries.

“I guess it’s Siddhartha’s interest in art that brought them together,” said Chandana. “One thing, Siddhartha was sure about — he wasn’t going to marry a doctor.”