The other day when a friend asked me about the most interesting people I had met in my journalistic career, the images of Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay, Doug Scott and Junko Tabei flooded my mind. All of them were members of the Everest club: people who had climbed the highest mountain in the world.
I met them at a seminar on mountaineering at the hill station of Darjeeling in West Bengal. It was 15 May 1985. To get an exclusive interview with Hillary, I went to the Sinclairs Hotel at 8.30 am. I was told he was having breakfast. So I went outside the restaurant, beckoned a waiter and passed a note requesting an interview. The waiter duly showed it to Hillary, who informed him that I could meet the mountaineer after breakfast.
Accordingly, after breakfast was over, I was led in. Hillary was seated with his wife June. He was very courteous and apologised for keeping me waiting. As I nervously asked my questions, June smiled encouragingly. Hillary was visibly taken aback when I asked him whether he thought of death during his ascent to the top of Everest. I guess he never expected a young man to ask such a question.
But his answer was memorable: “I was frequently frightened. I knew one mistake would result in me plunging to my death. So the triumph was not only over the mountain, but over all the fears and anxieties that were raging inside me.”
Later, just outside Bhanu Bhawan, I watched all these great mountaineers interacting with each other, during a tea break. Tabei was irrepressible. Barely five feet tall, there was something schoolgirlish about her behaviour. It was hard to believe she had become the first woman to have climbed Everest. She would later climb the highest peaks on all seven continents.
When Tabei came and stood beside Hillary, she said, “My, you are so tall!” Hillary, who was 6’5”, suddenly bent his knees till he reached Tabei’s height, and the latter put his arms around him and convulsed in laughter. Standing nearby was the famed mountaineer Scott, with his Gandhi specs and shoulder-length hair, who also hugged Tabei. Watching all this was Norgay with an enigmatic smile on his face.
The passage of time results in one unavoidable circumstance: death comes calling. Norgay (in 1986), Hillary (2008) and Tabei (2016) have all passed away, while Scott is now 76. All of them were extraordinary people. And in the process of climbing an outer mountain, they climbed an inner one, too.
Shevlin Sebastian
Email: shevlins@gmail.com