A Fire over Mount Everest

Floods, heatwave, hurricanes and storms — wild weather rips parts of the earth. While experts attribute these to El Niño and climate change, one wonders if peace and lifestyle choices could have any impact to reverse the changes on our home planet. Do wars add to our deep distress? We lose people, homes, what we nurtured and loved, the beautiful cities and structures we built, even forests, fields and rivers. The nuclear holocausts, the killing fields of the World Wars, the mined fields of Cambodia and Vietnam which continue to maim farmers… all these should have taught us to avoid wars but now when the television throws up images of war-torn zones, one wonders if those are worse than climate disasters?

In climate disasters we lose lives, homes and cities too — but people can step in to help and rebuild after the disaster. In a war setting, rescue workers are at a risk as bombs mow down terrain and destroys the tenor of daily lives. The disasters born of climate change too can be irreversible — especially with rising water levels, depleting shorelines and warmer climes ripped by storms. Which is worse — wars or climate disasters? What do you think? Could we go back to a pollution free world and reverse the darker impacts of climate change?

Just as history accepted wars and moved on, perhaps the time has come when climate change has to be accepted as a part of the new reality, and we have to find new ways of life. Exploring such stories is a book by Rajat Chaudhuri, The Climate Crossroads: Literature’s Encounter with a Planet on Fire. It has been reviewed by Bhaskar Parichha who tells us: “It reminds us that the climate crisis is not solely a scientific or political problem but also a crisis of imagination. Rajat Chaudhuri demonstrates with remarkable insight that stories are among humanity’s most powerful tools for understanding uncertainty, confronting ecological loss, and envisioning more just futures.” Somdatta Mandal, on the other hand, has brought in more on environment with her discussion of Siddharth Kak’s A Fire over Mount Everest. Andreas Geisbert adds colour to this section with his exploration of Angel Ramon’s Requiem of a Lost Nation. Satya Narayan Misra has reflected on Bhaskar Parichha’s Icons of Odisha – Lives that Shaped a State, a non-fiction whose excerpt tells us much about the journey of the author to bring to us community builders in various streams of life. We also have a bit from Kanupriya Dhingra’s non-fiction about a book bazaar that flourishes despite bookshops finding it hard to survive, The Sunday Book Bazaar: Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi.

Our interviews this month touch upon environmental issues with Keith Lyons conversing with Helen Townsend, environmental entrepreneur and plant enthusiast who is high on sustainability and earth friendly solutions while Suzanne Kamata has interviewed Lily West who has travelled to all the countries in the world and has put it all down in her memoir, West goes East. Like Kamata, she teaches in Japan now. Kamata has also given us a humorous piece on remote controls. Humour is a sentiment that has also been wrought into our nonfiction with a flourish by Devraj Singh Kalsi too. He writes of his wedding sherwani almost with a passion like the Dickensian Ms Havisham[1] exhibited for her crumbling wedding gown, except it has a different tone — that of wry tongue-in-cheek irony. Farouk Gulsara has a similar twinge of sarcasm as he muses on uncertainties in the future. Ian C Smith brings in a bit of the weather as he muses on a rainy day while Subramaniam Cheemalapati muses on the star-studded sky, dwelling on his anecdotal childhood experiences. Gowher Bhat introduces us to an aid worker who helps war victims. Meredith Stephens continues on her sailing adventures in Western Australia with photographs by her husband, Alan Noble. The photograph of the pink jellyfish is awesome. Do check it out!

Mandal has also explored six dance-dramas by Tagore translated from Bengali and Brajbuli by Indrani Haldar while Charudutta Panigrahi introduces us to an eighteenth-century literary giant, Upendra Bhanja, who gave up his crown not only to write but to found styles that are used to this date. Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan dwells on the contemporariness of ancient Sangam Literature with discussions on a narrative based on trust and power politics.

Fiction brings to us varied colours with a story from Jonathon B. Ferrini that almost has the lilt of a Hemingway novel. Naramsetti Umamaheswararao gives us a fable about a mischievous monkey with a ‘moral’ et all. Darshana Dutta shares a short fiction set in a fast-paced social media centric world while Sayan Sarkar gives a heartwarming story set in Kolkata. Mohul Bhowmick explores Hyderabad from the perspective of a woman.

Translations have brought in a shower of poetry with Tagore’s poem on a rainy-day hinting at shared confidences. Professor Fakrul Alam has translated Bengali lyrics Nazrul wrote for his friend and mentor, Rabindranath Tagore. Ihlwha Choi has brought to us a whiff of the Korean summer with his verses and Fazal Baloch has brought to us soulful poems from Balochi by Mohammad Hussain Anqa. Isa Kamari’s translations carry a flavour of Malay life in Singapore, and this set of verses bring to a close his book, The Lost Mantras. We are very privileged to have his entire book translated solely in our pages. Isa Kamari is an eminent literary voice of the Malay Singaporean community.

We have variety in poetry by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Maithreyi Karnoor, Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan, Norman J. Olson, Shamim Akhtar, SR Inciardi, Deepa Srivastava, Ron Pickett, Tanisha Tanwar, Jane Downing, Snehaprava Das, Snigdha Agrawal, and John Swain. Quite a few poems are to do with nature and environment. And humour — our best bet at surviving dark times — is chiselled into this section by Ryan Quinn Flanagan who dwells on the idea of a fountain of youth! And the inimitable Rhys Hughes brings us a genii of a Moka Pot! Is it funny? You tell me! He has gone back to his coffee mania – remember he had written The Coffee Rubaiyat and had a whole book called The Sunset Suite where they told tales over mugs of coffee – a bit in the tradition of Arabian Nights!

We have news about our hardcopy poetry anthology. We have had six media coverages in less than three months. Professor Malashri Lal deems: “For those of us who still believe in principles of care and compassion, humanism and amity, Wild Winds is a lifeline to keep afloat…It is especially commendable for wrapping global concerns in the fine tissue of hope.” And Mandal tells us: “Reading through these one hundred poems is indeed a pleasurable experience even for readers with a more prosaic temperament.” We are delighted that the book has had a warm welcome. Huge thanks to our publishers for giving us a hardcopy platform.

Thanks to all our contributors, readers and the fabulous team that make borderlessjournal.com come alive each month with a vibrant soul. Huge thanks to Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork. Do pause by our contents page for the July 2026 issue.

We wish you all happy reading!

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

[1] Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens

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Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: A Fire over Mount Everest

Author: Siddharth Kak

Publisher: Penguin Random House India


“I had given into a whim. It was not even a career move. Just the indulgence of a fantasy – to make a film on the highest mountain on earth.” 
                                                                                                       -- Siddharth Kak

Books on mountaineering, especially those narrating the climb to Mount Everest from various perspectives, are quite popular till date because though there have been more than fifteen hundred ascents, the aura of climbing and narrating the conquest of the highest peak in the world remains equally exciting even today. Even after so many deaths, Everest’s lure is eternal. India’s 1984 Expedition to Mount Everest, organised by the Indian Mountaineering Foundation (IMF), that succeeded in placing Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman and the fifth in the world, and four others, on the summit had noted filmmaker and television presenter, Siddharth Kak, and his crew of four cameramen follow this expedition from day one and record each moment of loss and triumph, instances of glory and distress. Though the expedition was romanticised in the world press as a story of bravery, teamwork and human triumph over nature, the entire narrative is told from a different point of view by Siddharth Kak. The spectacular achievement of that May 1984 is etched in history in glorious terms but it does not tell the behind-the-scenes stories of this expedition. This is where this book under review is particularly appealing.

Kak begins by telling us how he got involved in this project in the first place. A small news item in the newspaper in the summer of 1983 announced that after nineteen long years, a national expedition to Mount Everest, featuring seven women, was to be launched by the IMF the following year. Instantly Kak thought it would be a really cool and exciting adventure to capture in a documentary film. He approached Mr. H. C. Sarin under whose aegis the expedition was taking place, earnestly promising him that they would create a gripping script with human emotions and begin filming immediately with the expedition members and the selected girls all over India with their dreams and expectations even before the expedition started and then later match them with what actually happened. When they were confirmed as the official film crew for that particular Everest expedition in 1984, Kak was convinced that he didn’t need to be a mountaineer to make a mountain film.

The narrative then elaborates on how the people who would climb Mount Everest turned out to be very different from any he had ever met before. It was a largely Army team he met at the Delhi Cantonment. The team members included Col. Darshan Khullar, the 23-year -old former national judo champion, Sharavati Prabhu, Lt Col Premchand, Sonam Paljor of the ITBF, Naib Subedar N.D.Sherpa and a few others like Magan Bissa of Rajasthan and Flt Lt T. Sridharan. In those days, each expedition had to open its own route and ensure the safety of its own members. His four-member film team consisted of Deepak Haldankar, who was an ace cameraman in Films Division Delhi, Sanjeev Saith, a skilled mountaineer and still photographer, K. Nandakumar, the sound recordist, and Kak himself. They reached Kathmandu in an Army AN10 aircraft on 7 March 1984. From there they started their trek towards Lukla and several moments of rural celebration were etched in his heart as part of the romanticism of mountain life.

Kak describes in detail their next great filming adventure – a flight over Everest in an unpressurised cabin of a Pilatus Porter aircraft with the pilot Emil Wick while the cockpit door was kept open to capture the mountains in all their majesty. They had to even use chewing gum ingeniously to stick torn pieces of film together that had snapped at such high altitude.

The details of their experiences cannot be narrated within the brief purview of this review, but their stay at the Everest Base Camp, which was their home away from home for nearly two months, provided the most diverse and exciting mixed expedition that India had ever sent to Nepal and Everest. They discovered new aspects of life at high altitudes. Among the women were Bachendri Pal, Rekha P, Chandraprabha Aitwal and Sharavati Prabhu. All of them were equally competent, ‘an irresistible combination for the outside world’, but soon we get to know how they became victims of jealousies and whims of the very strict patriarchal team leaders, who acted according to an inherent army attitude of looking down upon these fellow women climbers. As Kak rightly states, they believed the mountains taught them camaraderie, but in the higher reaches, it was each man for himself.

We are then told of how Col Khullar’s ‘official’ decision about the composition of the three summit parties left women like Chandraprabha Aitwal, Rita Gombu and Rekha Sharma out without even consulting them and how ultimately Bachendri Pal successfully ascended the Everest Summit on 23 May 1984. Kak in his narrative therefore deals with the problems of male-centric mountaineering.
A Fire on Mount Everest springs from an understanding of an incredible moment etched in the memory of the author―a moment very few live to talk about. This is how Kak describes the experience of catching the incredible picture of the first sunrays that fell on the summit of the mountain:

“To an amateur like me, it seemed as if a gigantic fire was raging over Everest. Its majestic glow dwarfed the amphitheatre of the still dark 8000 metre peak around it, Lhotse and Nuptse, huddled in obeisance. It seemed as if Everest was carrying a heavenly torch lit by the gods themselves to symbolize the acme of achievement.

“I was stunned by this celestial display of nature’s savage beauty. I realized that we had been favoured by unseen mystical powers to see what the world had never seen before, a vision of Everest on fire, with towering flames that flew upwards to the heavens.”

After the disaster of the camera films being lost or destroyed, the scene only remains immortal in his memory. The fifty-two coloured as well as black-and-white pictures along with a hand-drawn map of the standard SE route up to Mount Everest that are included in the book add to the reader’s interest as visuals can communicate much better than written words.

The second half of the book appears to be even more interesting because what the author does is to try and locate each individual participant of that 1984 expedition and find out their present status, especially after the passage of forty long years. In the meantime, eight lonely deaths awaited some of the male members of the Everest 84 team. They included Sherpa Ang Dorjee, Major Kiran Inder Kumar, Major Jai Bahuguna, Phu Dorjee, Lopsang Tshering, N.D. Sherpa, the expedition doctor, Dr. Minoo Mehta, and the Deputy Leader of their expedition, Lt Col Premchand. Except for the male mountaineers who had passed on, the others, especially the women, were constantly evolving and adapting.

Kak clearly tells us how the world of mountaineering is not woman-friendly. Women themselves are both victims and perpetrators of a system that condemns them to second-class citizenship in the mountaineering hierarchy, as indeed in most of their lives. After taking a lot of trouble in locating the erstwhile women members of the team today who are located in different corners of the world, Kak realised how for a woman in India, it is difficult to combine an independent career with marriage and domesticity. With the exceptions of Sharavati Prabhu and Rita Gombu, the rest of the women members have carried on their mountaineering ambitions as single women. Certainly, for active mountaineers, like Chandraprabha P and Bachendri Pal, mountaineering began as a liberation from male dominance and continued as such throughout their life. It is sad to learn that the 1984 expedition left a bad taste in the mouth for many members. Their story never ended, not even on the fortieth anniversary in May 2024.

The last chapter of the book titled “The Black Everest” is really alarming as it shows how a new culture of dehumanisation is brought into play with commercialization of such climbs as it takes away from the very joy of ascending. At present the adventure, the romance and indeed, the thrill of mountaineering is literally reduced to a cold robotic logistic with high investment and returns, which do not necessarily go back to the mountain. The body count goes up every year, and ironically the fascination to climb Everest also rises in direct proportion to the increasingly visible thrill and danger of death in the higher reaches of the mountain. As Kak states: “My heart goes out to Everest, which appears as if it is being slowly disrobed due to self-defeating commercial priorities over and above the ravages of climate change, cataclysmic earthquakes and contamination littering its pristine slopes.” In 2023, despite all the advances in safety and technology, the highest number of people died – nearly a score – climbing Everest in a single season.

Reading this book on mountaineering by a non-mountaineer filmmaker like Siddharth Kak is a pleasurable experience. His simple, lucid style will surely entice one to pick it up and enjoy a thorough good read.

Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a retired Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

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