BENGALURU: When one lives in a city, ensconced by the doldrums of urbanity, perhaps the only things they think of scaling are the flights of stairs that lead up to their offices. Hills and mountains lie far away, neatly filed in the “vacations” folder, waiting to be visited through resorts and tourist guides. Scaling a mountain, even for the able bodied, is not an act of whim; for Bengaluru-based Priyanka Agarwal, who happens to be almost completely blind, it was not a whim either. Through sheer determination, she poised herself to scale, just a couple of weeks back, not just any mountain, but the base camp of the tallest in the world: Mount Everest.
Agarwal, who is only the second blind woman from India to achieve this, was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease marked by progressive deterioration of the retina’s photoreceptor (light-receiving) cells. While her eyesight began as normal, by the time she was in college, Agarwal could read only the headlines in a newspaper, as the fine print eluded her.
“I was born with good eyesight, but it got so bad that I could not read by the time I was in college. I have been dependent on screen-reading software ever since. Up to a couple of years ago, I could get around by myself, but even that has stopped now,” shares Agarwal.
The first glimpse of climbing – in any shape or form – was a mock-climbing exercise about a decade ago, and a Skandagiri trek around the same time, when she was about 65% blind. “I have had no formal training. I once watched a film about a young girl scaling Mount Everest, and especially during the pandemic years, the idea gripped me. But still, it is not something that I saw myself to be capable of doing.”
By the time Agarwal, with her husband, started the climb on April 5, she was 43, and only about 10% of her sight remained. But this did not come about without some experienced help along the way. “I volunteer at the Inclusive India Foundation, and at one of our inclusion summits, I met Tinkesh Kaushik, who was the first triple amputee to reach the Everest base camp. I came to know about his work in training persons with disabilities to climb mountains, and he agreed to train me,” says Agarwal.
Of course, there is only so much preparation training can offer. When Agarwal was made to be part of a trekking group that paired her with a local mountaineer, she found her guide to be someone who had not received formal training in guiding a person with blindness. “She had no formal training in guiding a person with a disability, so we had to improvise in a tricky situation. There were many boulders along the way that I did not anticipate, and given that my guide was not spontaneous in giving me vertical directions, the climb was made even more unpredictable,” she shares.
On April 14, with her husband Dimpesh Bhatewara, Agarwal reached the Everest base camp, which rests at an elevation of 5364 m above the sea level. The nine-day journey saw her amass her grit and focus her instincts through uneven boulders, hailstorms, and sub-zero temperatures to reach a point that would make most shudder. At a point when Agarwal could barely make out shapes of people even when they stood in her proximity, she stood undeterred while facing perhaps the most daunting of shapes, buoyed by a spirit that refused to waver even when the tallest peak came calling.