An ode to a nightingale

• 15th death anniversary of Chandra de Silva

It was the 20th of August 1966 in the United States. It was a Saturday and the Beatles had been pelted with rotten fruit at their Memphis concert. Two days earlier they had played in Boston to an audience of 25,000. At the Boston University (BU), on 20 August, Chandra was overjoyed for other reasons. The long nights and days completing her Master’s thesis on Administration in Education were over and the University stamped the date on her certificate. 

She was in illustrious company as a postgraduate from BU. Martin Luther King Jr. earned a PhD from Boston University in 1955. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone conducted many of his experiments on the BU campus when he was professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution. In 2011, a contemporary celebrity, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman elected to the US House of Representatives, graduated from BU. There were subsequently, three Nobel Prize winners in physics and chemistry among its alumni. 

August 1966 was an eventful month in the United States. On 6 August, a day before her birthday, US citizens demonstrated against the Vietnam War. A few days later, on the 10th NASA launched Lunar Orbiter 1 to the Moon to photograph the lunar surface. More to Chandra’s taste than the Beatles, earlier that year Frank Sinatra recorded ‘Strangers in the Night’ as a single in April and by July it had reached number 1 in the US charts. She was a fan, and his records would be among the many that she bought to bring back home. 

Boston University was a progressive institution unusual for that time in history. The Boston Bridge over the Charles River across from the University was a favourite view. In 1965, Chandra visited New York’s World Fair and had photographs of herself crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. She bought postcards to send home depicting the symbol of the exhibition, the Unisphere, with the theme ‘Peace through Understanding’. In the winter of 1965, she visited the snowcapped Mountain Monadnock in New Hampshire. She visited New York City and United Nations building.

Early in 1966 she had left University accommodation to move in to No. 33 Linden, Park Street, Roxbury, Boston, with two of her Indian colleagues, where they cooked, studied, and laughed and sang together with Chandra playing the Spanish guitar. They went often to the cinema and Chandra became a lifelong fan of Sidney Poitier. She was both happy and sad that her time in Boston was coming to an end.

She had been offered a WHO scholarship to do her Master’s at BU. At the end of her time there, she was offered another scholarship to complete her PhD, this time by the faculty, based on their evaluation of her research. The first woman to earn a PhD in the United States, Magill, attended the graduate School at Boston University, earning her Ph.D. in Greek in 1877. Chandra had to reverse her decision to accept when her husband refused to support her in her choice and wrote to her insisting that she returns. She was to be offered two more chances by the WHO to study for a PhD and each time, the Ministry of Health in Sri Lanka refused to release her, even though one time it was to do it at weekends at Peradeniya University. 

Though understandably disheartened at not being able to continue her studies at BU, she decided to get a round-the-world ticket on her way back from Boston perhaps as consolation. Never one to hold a grudge, she would also order a Volkswagen Beetle, which was all the rage in Boston at the time, for her husband.

Chandra was Principal of the School of Nursing in Kandy when she was offered a scholarship to the United States. Ever since she returned from India, having successfully completed her BSc (Honours) degree at Delhi University (DU), she had been striving to uplift the profession and to introduce university education for nurses in Ceylon. India meanwhile was way ahead in its consciousness. 

When Chandra went to Delhi in 1950, it was just three years after India had been granted Independence. Delhi was filled with refugees after the bloody partition at Independence. It was in 1950, following tensions that had built up between India and East Pakistan (Now Bangladesh), that the Delhi Pact was signed between Nehru, Prime Minister of India, and Liaquat Ali Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan to assure minority rights, but months later it was reported that an estimated million people had crossed the borders. 

Chandra loved her four years in Delhi. She became fluent in Hindi. Tagore became her favourite poet. She and her friends danced at the international students’ events with the ever-unselfish Chandra often playing the piano for them. Her lecturers made clear that they were being trained to take over from the British who left the subcontinent handing over the responsibility to maintain the standards of the institutions and to improve on them. DU had its own notable alumni before and after her time. Aung San Suu Kyi, Narendra Modi and Zia Ul Haq were all DU graduates.

She did take over the responsibility for improving the standard of nursing education at the Ministry of Health within a year after her return from Boston. For the first time since its inception, she updated the curriculum introducing science subjects, doing most of the curriculum development herself and ensuring regular updating. She also opened new Schools of Nursing in Badulla and Batticaloa and sent around 60 nursing professionals to different parts of the world for further training during her tenure. She submitted proposals to introduce a degree program for nurses in 1967, 1974 and in 1978 to all the relevant authorities but could not get their support to implement them. Neither the doctors in charge nor the authorities saw any value in such an investment.

It would take 26 years since she returned to Ceylon, despite relentless efforts, to finally start a BSc Degree in Nursing at the Open University in Nawala in 1993.  Four young women from Sri Lanka had left for Delhi University together in 1950. She coaxed two of them to join her when she started her work on preparing for the new unit at the OUSL. One of them, Trixie Martinez wrote an entertaining little book called ‘Those Delhi Days,’ reminiscing about their time at DU.

Having started from scratch, 75 students registered for the BSc Nursing course at the OUSL and 21 graduated in 1997. Today, many students have received degrees and the best among them each year gets an award in her name. Before she passed away, while still employed at the OUSL, she was able to oversee the start of the MSc in Nursing and know that the PhD program was not far off. She would be happy if she could know of recent plans to convert all Schools of Nursing into degree-awarding institutions.

In between these contributions and achievements, she worked for a few years as a UN consultant to the WHO, the ILO and the UNDP in Islamabad, developing the Five-Year Health Education Plan for Pakistan which was successfully implemented there. On her return she also worked for several years at the Ministry of Defence as the Project Director of the Dangerous Drugs Control Board. She left when she got the opportunity to start the Nursing degree at the Open University, a long-held dream come true.

She was a woman of quiet determination, courage and achievement in her professional life against great odds. Her contribution has uplifted thousands. The greatest thing about her though was her capacity to achieve so much without compromising her values, with unfailing kindness as an overarching aspect of her personality. 

Pope Francis quotes St. Paul describing this quality using the Greek word chrestótes, which he says describes an attitude that is gentle, pleasant and supportive, not rude or coarse. Individuals who possess this quality help make other people’s lives more bearable, especially by sharing the weight of their problems, needs and fears. This way of treating others can take different forms: an act of kindness, a concern not to offend by word or deed, a readiness to alleviate their burdens. It involves “speaking words of comfort, strength, consolation and encouragement” and not “words that demean, sadden, anger or show scorn”. 

Most people who knew Chandra would recognise her in these words. It fits her so perfectly that I couldn’t add anything more to describe my beloved mother, who lived her life embodying all those qualities during the most difficult of times.

A professional woman first and foremost, dedicated to enabling others obtain the same educational privileges that she had experienced, she never let her lacerating trials in her personal life discourage her from pursuing the higher goals of service to humanity, transcending the worst of human nature that she had to face domestically without any diminution of the light that shone from an ever-expanding heart.