How can I forget Phu Dorje

Some weeks after Phu Dorje became the first Indian climber to ascend Mount Everest without oxygen in May 1984, I received a rain-splattered postcard in Jamshedpur, where I was posted at the time.

Written at the Base Camp by an expedition colleague a fortnight before his successful ascent, the sodden postcard revealed the palpable excitement of this 35-year-old semi-literate Tibetan. That postcard remains one of my prized possessions. Unassumingly and entirely in character, Dorje declared that he was ‘particularly’ fortunate in having the opportunity to scale the world’s tallest mountain, for which later that year, he was awarded the Padma Shri alongside Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman to scale Everest in the same expedition.

The reticent and hugely considerate mountaineer was seeking my blessings in the missive for his colossal triumph, taking me back four years to August 1980 when I had first met him in Leh. At the time, Dorje was Security Assistant number 300 and had been nominated as my caddy. He would follow me round the golf course impassively, never uttering a word or displaying any emotion even when I muffed easy strokes, which was often!

Soon after, a team from the Sonam Gyatso Mountaineering Institute (SGMI) in Gangtok arrived in Leh to instruct rookies in mountain craft that would enable them to man check-posts along the Line of Actual Control with China. I noticed that Dorje, despite his inverted trapezoid body, was held in high esteem by the instructors for his innate climbing skills and ice craft, and was frequently called upon to demonstrate complex mountaineering manoeuvres.

In 1982, SGMI’s principal Sonam Wangyal — better known as Hero Sahib in his native Ladakh, having summitted Everest in 1965 — appointed Dorje the lead instructor at his institute, and two years later nominated him for the IMF team due to attempt Everest.

By then, Dorje had established his credentials to merit this selection. He had stood first in both the Basic and Advanced Mountaineering courses and in 1979 had partnered Gyamtsho Bhutia — later SGMI principal and also leader of the Indian Police Expedition that successfully climbed Everest in 2008 — in putting 22 climbers atop Siniolchu, the 22,600 feet high peak adjoining Kanchenjunga in Sikkim. Douglas Fairfield, the British mountaineer and editor of the Alpine Journal in the late 19th century, had described Siniolchu as the world’s most “superb triumph of mountain architecture”.

In his early years in Ladakh, Dorje was also responsible for singlehandedly rescuing a reconnaissance party stuck in Galwan Nullah, east of the Karakoram Range. He did the same in the precipitous Changchenmo, or Great Northern Gorge, through which flows the river by the same name originating in the disputed Aksai Chin as a tributary of Shyok river, which eventually joins the Indus.

The expedition leader, Col DK Khullar, has recorded that “Phu Dorje’s solo was a different story”. During his assault on the peak on May 9, 1984, Dorje took the extraordinary step of requisitioning the radio from a team of descending Bulgarian summiteers — as his own had collapsed — to seek Col Khullar’s permission to proceed alone to the summit, after two of his colleagues had turned back and he himself was out of oxygen.

Permission was granted, and by noon Dorje was atop Everest without the aid of oxygen. On his descent, he glissaded down the sheer slopes, overtaking the descending Bulgarians so that he could brew tea for them before they arrived at the summit camp. Dorje had attained this exceptional feat just six years after Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler were the first to ever scale Everest without oxygen on May 8, 1978.

In May 1987, Dorje was picked as lead climber in the Assam Rifles expedition to Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain. He led the first three-member assault squad to the peak, again without oxygen, but none of them returned. All the second assault team found of Dorje and his team were Buddhist prayer flags some 25 feet below the summit.

It appeared that in deference to folklore and a commitment that climbers had made years earlier to Sikkim’s Chogyal or ruler, the ill-fated climbers had not set foot on the hallowed peak to maintain its sacrosanctity and were seemingly swept away by a blizzard to an icy death. Efforts to recover their bodies proved futile. Dorje was posthumously awarded the Kirti Chakra in 1989 for his accomplishment.

Kanchenjunga, known as the Abode of Gods, it seemed, had forever claimed the talented cherub-faced mountaineer, who had pledged to serve God, as its own. He left behind a sister in Leh and scores of grieving colleagues like myself who warmly salute Phu Dorje, the intrepid mountaineer.