Geeta did not know what to do with her hands. She wrapped her arms around her stomach and rocked back and forth. She gripped her chair and then admonished herself for straining her fingers –a risk she should have avoided since she was a cellist. Ultimately, she shielded her face with her hands, obscuring the white tiles of the hospital floor from view.

She had been in the middle of her college elective-course on Shakespearean literature, reading the opening shipwreck scene of The Tempest, when she received her aunt’s text: “Your father and I are at the ER.” She frantically searched the bus schedule on her phone, dashed across the college campus in the pelting November Seattle rain to catch the bus, only to be stuck in evening traffic for an hour before being shoved by the wind and rain into the hospital’s entrance.

A nurse finally arrived and brought her to the room where her father, who had been admitted as a patient to the hospital, was resting. Geeta entered and saw her aunt bent over the bed, adjusting the sheets and speaking in Hindi to him. He reached for Geeta and enfolded her in his arms, experiencing true respite for the first time that day. Geeta’s aunt began to describe what had transpired, “We were driving to–”

“To get some rambutans! Costco sells them now,” her father said mirthfully, his wan face now gaining color. He smiled wistfully at his failed attempt to attain that prickly red fruit with its smooth, succulent interior. It was his favorite fruit, yet he could not remember how that had come to be, the facts of the fruit becoming tangled with fragments of memories. Was he introduced to it in India or the US? Something about the fruit’s cultivation in the southern Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu resonated dimly, and he thought he had read that they were imported from Thailand and Malaysia. But had he eaten them in his home of northern India? He felt desperate to recall the name of the fruit that he had smuggled into his backpack as a child, savoring them as he rode on the rickshaw to school, but it was probably a mango or tamarind. He closed his eyes and moved his head from side to side, wishing that the brain tumor could fall out and clear his mind.

“He started shaking in the car,” her aunt vividly recounted. “He was having a seizure! He lost consciousness, so I drove straight to the ER.”

Geeta held her aunt’s and father’s hands, responding quietly, “The seizures seem more frequent now.” She had been worried for the past few months; she knew they all had been. His brain tumor was now in the most advanced stage –a glioblastoma. He had decided recently to retire early from the software company he worked at. Geeta had reduced her university course load, so she could care for him at home, and her aunt, a pharmacist, had been coming to their house daily to help.

“But do you know what we were listening to in the car?” her father asked, leaning close to Geeta. “Pablo Casals playing Dvořák’s Cello Concerto.” He added, with a rueful grin, “I almost made it to the end of the first movement.”

***

When Geeta’s father immigrated to the US for graduate school, he had found some cassette-tapes under his dorm-room bed, left by the previous student, including one labeled “Dvořák-Cello-Casals.” Having only been exposed to Indian classical music, he decided to play the Dvořák tape. He was transfixed by Casal’s performance and began his foray into Western classical music then.

Geeta was born into this world of Western and Eastern tunes, listening to Hindustani raags and Chopin as lullabies. She had in fact been named Geeta because it meant “song” in Sanskrit. Although initially enchanted by the crisp, clean, euphonious sounds of Chopin’s piano, she ultimately chose the cello, with her father’s hearty approbation, and began lessons at a young age. It was such a bulky instrument for a small person, but she was fascinated by the sonorous tones that could be produced: by sliding a finger up and down a string, she could play, for example, the notes F, G, and the F-sharp/G-flat that existed in between. But she could also produce a version of F that was slightly sharper than F but not completely F-sharp and a version of G that was slightly flat but not too flat to become G-flat. It was a world of infinite pleasure.

Besides pleasure, music became a source of comfort as father and daughter navigated the vicissitudes of life –he as a single-parent and she as an only-child. Geeta’s mother died shortly after giving birth to Geeta due to postpartum hemorrhage –the uncontrollable vaginal blood loss causing her blood pressure to plummet, limiting blood flow to the organs, and sending her body into shock. Her sudden death sent shockwaves across the ocean to their family in India, but it was Geeta’s father who internalized the impact of her passing the most. He was too shocked at first to even grieve, looking only at Geeta in her crib, who gazed innocently at his face and cooed, oblivious to the disbelief that had clouded his eyes. Gradually, the shock became waves of desolation, guilt, even self-anger, and he turned to old songs to cope. He found some Indian raag recordings made by his wife, who had been a Hindustani classical vocalist. Listening to the warm, meditative notes of raag bhupali, he remembered their first evening in Seattle –standing at the top of the Space Needle, watching the russet sunset evanesce behind the snowcapped Mount Rainier. He then immersed himself in Western classical music, finding that Saint-Saëns’ cello solo The Swan and Jules Massenet’s Méditation from the opera Thaïs resonated with him –the elegiac melodies had an undercurrent of passion that burst with aching intensity at times. It was the second movement of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, however, that always elicited from him a paroxysm of tears –partly because of its inherent, poignant beauty, partly because it reminded him fondly of his college days, but partly also because of the story behind the composition. Dvořák had written the second movement in honor of his sister-in-law when she was ill, and he had romantically loved her when they were young, though his love was unrequited. Moreover, Dvořák had woven into the second movement one of her favorite songs that he had previously composed –Kéž duch můj sám (Leave me alone). In the time that Geeta’s father spent alone with this music, he began to piece together his life and a plan for how to continue living –not solely for his sake but also for his daughter’s.

Geeta eventually learned that she had no mother. In pre-school, she watched her peers hug their mothers before heading inside the school building, and she spent Mother’s Days poring over old photos of her mother while her peers were out celebrating. But she did not feel emotionally orphaned, for her father was there for her –ready in the morning with a lunchbox packed with peeled rambutans and a sandwich and ready to pick her up after school. He supported her music lessons and kindled in her something that she felt she would never lose –a love for music. Over the years, she still wondered what it would be like if her mother was alive, but she found comfort in the fact that her mother, the musician, was there –in the raags that her father listened to and in the music that she played on the cello.

Geeta ultimately decided to become a professional cellist. She relished sharing her music onstage and often searched the audience for her father, who always came to her performances –until the past few months, when his health deteriorated.

***

She remembered the small moments: how his headaches came every now and then, the nausea and vomiting in the morning. Once, when they were cooking together, he bent to open the oven door to take out a casserole dish of chicken biryani but felt dizzy and stumbled, the dish shattering onto the ground, the white grains of basmati rice matched only by the pallor of his skin.

He was diagnosed with WHO grade III astrocytoma and received the standard of care: surgery, then radiation and concomitant temozolomide chemotherapy with adjuvant temozolomide. After seven months, however, his tumor relapsed.

He enrolled in a trial for an experimental drug, which gave him some relief, allowing him to rise from bed each morning to do some exercise and occasionally go for a car ride to the supermarket with his sister, who drove, as he was unable to drive. But in the past few weeks, he woke to dull headaches that could not be alleviated by ibuprofen or Tylenol and experienced increased nausea and weakness in his left upper arm. He was easily distracted, and the quotidian aspects of living –cooking, checking the mail, even wearing clothes –became challenging. A recent biopsy demonstrated that the tumor had progressed to grade IV glioblastoma, the most advanced stage. He began staying indoors more and was unable to attend Geeta’s latest performance of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 because he was too weak to leave his bed. His only consolation was being able to listen to the YouTube recording of her performance, the polyphonic melodies satiating him in a way that solid food could not in recent days.

***

Although Geeta’s father watched her successful performance, he did not know about the times she had stared blankly at her sheet music during practice sessions, her fingers and bow moving listlessly on the strings. She was distracted by the various roles she was juggling –musician, college student, caregiver –but more than that, she was unmoored by the realization that she would lose another parent. She forced herself to remember that as a musician, she was also an actor: she had to convey any emotions that the music required, convincingly to the audience, regardless of what she was feeling or unable to feel. But her mind drifted back to the lines from Hamlet that she had read in class: I have lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises…the earth seems to me a sterile promontory…what is this quintessence of dust?

Walking out of the music building one day, she noticed a poster of the eminent cellist Jacqueline du Pré, whose career was tragically cut short after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Geeta observed how du Pré’s fingers were relaxed on the bow, her fingers on the strings seemingly nimble though most likely in pain, her hair billowing around her face. But it was the glimmer of a smile on her face, in the midst of life-limiting illness, that stirred something within Geeta.

Geeta understood that time was limited. She planned to perform Dvorak’s Cello Concerto at the student concerto series in the spring, but she was unsure if her father would make it until then. She needed to focus on her upcoming winter performance of Bach –for his sake.

***

“So, at the ER,” her aunt continued, “the doctors gave him anti-seizure medication. There’s increased intracranial pressure from the tumor, causing the increased drowsiness, seizures…”

She paused and proceeded with difficulty, “They said we should consider hospice care.”

***

Geeta’s father was transferred to the hospice center at the hospital as the family felt that it was the best decision for his comfort and safety. Over the next two weeks, he woke, bathed, attempted to read, ate lunch with a nurse’s assistance, then napped until Geeta and her aunt visited. They drank chai together, which Geeta’s aunt prepared with extra cardamom in a thermos from home, and ate dinner before sleep pulled him away again.

One afternoon, he listened to Debussy’s Clair de Lune, the oneiric piano tune transporting him to another dimension. He found himself at the Ganges River in Varanasi, India, his birthplace, holding Geeta’s Hamlet in his hands, the words trembling under the moonlight: To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream…

He woke to the susurrus of someone rummaging through papers.

“Geeta…” he murmured.

She looked up from her backpack, “Sorry to wake you. I was trying to find my copy of Twelfth Night.”

“I think you left it there,” he pointed to a bedside table in the corner of the room. It had become her desk, where she did her homework when he was sleeping.

“Ah yes,” she laughed, retrieving the book.

“If music be…” he grasped at the elusive words, “the food of love.”

She smiled and decided to open the book to the scene he had quoted, reading aloud:

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

“The funny thing,” Geeta mused, “is that when Duke Orsino says that famous first line to the musicians at his palace, he’s lovesick after being rejected by Countess Olivia. So, he wants the musicians to play on, to feed him so much music and love that he will become sick of love and no longer pine for Olivia.”

“Sick of music and love,” her father chuckled. “Of all the things in my life that will sicken and die, I don’t think my appetite for music will.”

His face turned pensive then, his eyes fixed on Geeta, solemn and resolute. “Geeta, when I’m no longer here, you must play on,” he adjured. “You must play on.”

Geeta nodded and then stared down at the book, unable to meet his eyes as tears began to fill her own. She wished that if music could cure lovesickness, it could cure his cancer.

***

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…the words from Macbeth, Geeta’s last reading assignment, felt like a prophecy. Three days later, her father was gone.

Her aunt arranged a ceremony at home with the help of a local Hindu priest. On a white cloth spread out on the floor of the living room, they placed a picture of Geeta’s father, an urn containing his ashes, flowers, and prasad (offerings to deities that were later consumed by the ceremony’s attendees) such as sooji, a sweet made from semolina flour, and his favorite rambutans. The priest put pieces of wood in a stone bowl and set the wood aflame. He delivered a long prayer in Sanskrit, chanting svaha at the end of each mantra to signify destruction as a necessary end to life, allowing for the soul to be released from the body for reincarnation.

The ancient music reminded Geeta of something –on the day her father suffered the seizure in the car, he had mentioned how he almost made it to the end of the first movement of Casal’s performance of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto. Following the end of the prayer, Geeta fetched her cello, deciding to finish the movement for him. She would play on.

Alice Ranjan is a graduate of the University of Washington-Seattle, where she received a B.S. in Microbiology, B.S. in Molecular/Cellular/Developmental Biology, and a minor in English. During her time there, she served as a founding member and editor-in-chief of Capillaries Journal (https://www.capillariesjournal.com/), a publication that includes written and art works on health, illness, and healing, as well as academic pieces on public/global health issues. She has also worked as a cancer research fellow at the National Institutes of Health and aspires to combine medicine, clinical research, and the arts in her future career. You can find her on Twitter @Alice_Ranjan.

Header image: ILEHC sweet gelding, Mac. Adopted Winter 2022 to a lucky owner.