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Book review:
Twined, entwined
Title: Same Sky,
Different Nights
Author: Nandasiri Jasentuliyana
Published by Vijitha Yapa Publications
It is hard to read an autobiography without making yourself supremely
judgmental. Harder still, not to ask yourself one critical question: is
this someone I would like to emulate?
 When I read Barack Obama’s “Dreams from my Father,” the answer was,
no. When I read Prof. Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s ‘Pin athi Sarasavi
Varamak Denne’ the answer, still, was no. I am not sure if I was asking
this question from myself when I took Dr. Nandasiri Jasentuliyana’s
autobiography, ‘Same Sky, Different Nights’ into my hands. But if I had
done so, I would easily have found the answer within the first pages of
the book where Dr. Ananda Guruge introduces the writer, leaving no room
for debate. Reminding one that “there is nothing in the whole world
which could not be achieved through dedicated concentration on goals and
well-directed hard work,” Dr. Guruge says, Dr Jasentuliyana, President
Emeritus, International Institute of Space Law (IISL) whose
‘achievements on the world scene are as wide-ranging as they are
inspiring” is an ideal role model for any aspiring young person.
Especially so, because the journey which would eventually lead him to
the high offices of the United Nations as the Director of the United
Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and Deputy Director- General of
the United Nations in Vienna, begins in the suburban town of
Ambalangoda, where Dr. Jasentuliyana spends an almost idyllic childhood
attending the village school, rowing back and forth in the Dodanduwa Oya
in a catamaran, gazing at the Hawker Hurricane aircraft in the sky,
totally oblivious of either the English language or the phenomenon
called outer space.
Yet, the days were not always full of sunshine and laughter. In one
of the most heart rending passages of the book he recalls losing his
mother at the tender age of three. When he saw her lying in her coffin
in the sitting room of his Seeya’s house in Ambalangoda, he says
“Wondering what she was doing there, I remember going half way up the
staircase to get a better look...” Since then the only link he has with
his mother is when he visits her grave in the public cemetery but even
this memento is lost in the devastations of the 2004 tsunami. He admits
growing up; there were uncountable numbers of times when he had yearned
for the love of a mother; when he had felt his whole life was a loveless
void. Yet, he admits as if to make up for her early demise, in their own
inimitable ways, his uncles, aunts and cousins had showered him with an
infinite quantity of love and affection. He declares he “loved them back
with the same fervour.”
Over time, a whole new world emerges: a world of growing up in the
mid 20th century, as days turn to months, as new calendars replace the
old. The memorable chapter titled “Thaththa” begins with this lyrical
passage “A nine year old boy stands on the bank of the Dodanduwa Oya a
few hours after the sun begins his journey westward. He stretches his
arms in front of him, takes a deep breath and makes a clean dive into
the crystal clear water...He is next seen on a catamaran mastering it
across the same waters as the sun reaches his zenith. The boy feels the
soft breeze caressing his cheeks, hears the soft splash as a kingfisher
catches its midday meal, and finds an immense sense of peace, engulf his
heart.” Dr. Jasentuliyana adds, “I know how he felt. More than seventy
years later he still lives somewhere deep within me.”
Flashback to the present. A search light looking for him two years
ago would have found him seated on the deck of his house in Los Angeles.
It was here, under a starlit sky with his wife, Shanthi seated beside
him in companionable silence that he had taken the first steps in the
journey back into the past which would eventually end up as a book of
over six-hundred pages spanning more than seven decades. “As I gazed at
the full moon and the stars in the sky” Writes Dr. Jasentuliyana “it
dawned on me how vast the length and enormity of the journey was that I
had travelled, from those early years when the sky had fascinated me to
the present when I had taken part in creating laws and regulations to
tether the infinite plains of outer space.”
Quoting from John Donne’s Meditation XVII “No man is an island,
Entire of itself..,” Dr. Jasentuliyana says he could not have made this
journey from the small town boy who played on the banks of the Madu
Ganga in Ambalangoda to the offices of the United Nations where he
worked with Secretary General Kofi Annan, and met the likes of President
Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, Rev. Desmond Tutu, Buzz Aldrin etc without
the help of family and friends. “The journey of my life is interwoven
with the journeys of an uncountable number of others; family, teachers,
colleagues, role models” he writes. “Each place I travelled through,
each person I met perhaps by being at the right place at the right time,
perhaps through sheer chance, moulded me into the person I am today.”
Indeed, ‘Same Sky, Different Nights’ is not only Dr. Jasentuliyana’s
life story, but a collection of semi biographies of an uncountable
number of others. Through his work he brings into the limelight the
lives of all those who happened to cross his path from the two teachers
who taught him in Dodanduwa, Kithsiri Kumarasinghe and Amaris, to Namel
and Malini Weeramuni to Henry Jayasena to, Wickrama Weerasooria and many
others, generously dedicating huge portions of the book to write about
their stories, their achievements and the cherished moments he had
shared with them.
Like the stars in the sky the book covers such a kaleidoscope of
personalities you are bound to come across many, whose names would ring
not one but several bells, and about whose lives you will get an intense
glimpse rarely found in other biographies. Recalling his encounters with
Henry Jayasena Dr. Jasentuliyana writes “At the time he (Henry Jayasena)
visited me in New York the ‘Chalk Circle’ was staged at the famous
Lincoln Centre Play House. I thoroughly enjoyed the play in his company.
The next night after dinner when he was lounging on an armchair I asked
him to sing the melodies from his version of the play. I still have a
tape that I recorded with him strumming the tunes tapping on the
chair...”
Dr. Jasentuliyana concludes the first paragraph of his prologue with
the words “This then is as much their story as it is mine.”
As you read the book, ‘Same Sky, Different Nights’, will become not
only ‘his story’ and ‘their story’ but your story too.
Witty, humorous, informative, lyrical – here is surely one of the
most significant literary enterprises of our times.
- Aditha Dissanayake
[email protected]
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