| Over the last three decades Magan Bissa, one of India's top mountaineers, has attempted to scale Mount Everest four times and twice come within a thousand feet of the
summit. His relationship with the mountain has impacted his life and finances.
but bissa, who was nearly killed during his latest attempt, still dreams of the everest from his hospital bed
By MURALI K MENON
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The day's last light touches Mt Everest and nearby peaks in Nepal |
Towards the end of our meeting in a New Delhi hospital, the inevitable question about whether Magan Bissa will ever attempt Mount Everest again bobs up in the space between us. Bissa looks away and cries. As his wife Sushma dabs the tears he tells me, “Ab toh bas dream hi rah gaya (Now, it will always remain a dream).” The 54-year-old, it would appear, has finally accepted the grim truth: the mountains choose their men.
I first came across Bissa in 2007 when MW did a small story on this man from Bikaner who had attempted Everest thrice and had twice come within a thousand feet of scaling the world’s highest mountain. At that time he sounded hopeful of another attempt at besieging the massif. Bissa, who runs a scrap recycling business named Everest Steel Corporation, had promised me that he would give me a call when he finally set foot on the summit. Then, in late September last year, I got a call from him. He said he was in a hospital, recuperating between surgeries on his intestines. His latest try had failed. He had called because he remembered me and the MW story, which a lot of people had liked. Two months later, I learnt that Bissa was still in Delhi, battling a potentially life-threatening condition known as mesenteric ischaemia, a rare medical condition that is caused by decreased intestinal blood flow. It was time, I thought, to put a face to an intensely determined man with a magnificent obsession with a mountain that has, in a display of anthropomorphic whimsicality, never allowed him the satisfaction of conquering her.
 Bissa, once a well-built, luxuriantly moustachioed man, is no ordinary mountaineer. He started climbing in an age when, unlike today’s trophy climbing carnivals, the icy heights of the black pyramid were still the domain of hard-core mountaineers. He is a recipient of the Indian Mountaineering Foundation gold medal (1993) — previous winners include Tenzing Norgay, who along with Edmund Hillary first summitted the mountain in 1953, and Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman to scale Everest — a tribute to both his technical excellence as a climber and for his role in grooming young mountaineering and adventure enthusiasts in both Rajasthan and north India. Brigadier D K Khullar, an Everester who has worked closely with Bissa, calls him “a great survivor”. “He was an unknown commodity when I first met him, but he soon proved his calibre. His case is all the more admirable when you think he hails from a desert state.”
Bissa has scaled nearly every major peak in the Indian Himalayas, including Saser Kangri, and Nanda Devi East, the more challenging of the grand massif’s twin peaks, and Mt Rimo in the Karakoram. But since the time he decided to leave Bikaner after finishing his college education, Bissa has always wanted to climb Everest. “You should come visit our house one day,” says Sushma, as she adjusts the blanket around her husband’s feet. “Wherever you look it’s full of photographs of the Himalayas and Everest.” While still in college in Bikaner Bissa, who wanted to do “something different with his life”, joined the National Cadet Corps (NCC) and through their various camps, got introduced to mountaineering. “My first train journey out of Bikaner happened after I joined the NCC and before I went with them to northern India I was always blank whenever people talked about mountains.” The time spent with the NCC fanned his passion for adventure and he convinced his parents to let him join one of India’s premier mountaineering institutes. He enrolled at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling because it had “the word Himalayas in it” and trained under Norgay and his nephew Nawang Gombu, the first man to climb Everest twice. After every theory session at the institute Bissa used to run to the Everest Museum in Darjeeling and scrutinise each photograph and exhibit for hours until he had memorised each and every route and nearly every crease on the mountain. Bissa’s gravelly voice mellows when he speaks of Everest. The first time he saw it in the flesh was in 1984 when he was flying from Kathmandu to Lukhla in eastern Nepal as part of an Indian Everest expedition. “It’s not beautiful like Kailash, the south face is very rocky, but it’s still alokik (a heavenly sight).”
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Bissa with wife Sushma, an avid mountaineer herself, at the Everest base camp in May last year |
On the 1984 expedition Bissa was a 1,000 feet away from the summit on a clear May evening when he was confronted with two choices. He could either continue his ascent or tend to fellow mountaineer Sonam Paljor. Paljor had already scaled Everest earlier that day and was supposed to have been back at South Col or Camp IV, a wind-battered saddle that links Everest with adjoining Lhotse. (The Everest is attempted in stages. The base camp is situated at an altitude of 17,500 ft, while Camp IV, the staging place for the final ascent, is at
26,000 ft.) But he had run out of oxygen on his way back and sat huddled by the route, minutes away from being sucked into a fatal oxygen-deprived stupor. Bissa helped the fumbling Paljor back on his feet, removed his own oxygen cylinders and mask and strapped them onto Paljor. He then led the Indo-Tibetan Border Police officer back to Camp IV. For his successful ascent of Everest Paljor was awarded the Padma Shree. For Bissa, on the other hand, Mount Everest would become a chimera he would chase unsuccessfully over the next two and a half decades.
Bissa attempted Everest again in 1985 as part of an Indian Army expedition. He opened the route on the southwest face of the mountain, negotiated his way right up till about 26,700 feet and began his ascent of the southeast ridge. The southeast ridge, a knife-edge strip with both snow and rock, is among the most dangerous sections of the climb, exposing as it does climbers to an 8,000 ft fall down the southwest face. Like in 1984, it was, says Bissa, a calm day. But waiting for him on the ridge were ominously strong winds, which transformed into a violent storm. “I realised that death was certain if I ascended further, par mujhe try karna tha toofan ho ya na ho ( but I wanted to try despite the storm).” Bissa hollered out to his partner a couple of metres below and signalled to him to anchor himself before moving ahead and not stray from the fixed ropes that lead up the ridge. (Climbers clip to the fixed rope and also attach a mechanical ascender, which permits them to climb up the rope.) But somewhere along the way his partner made a fatal mistake and the wind yanked Bissa and threw him some 700 ft off the ridge. As he fell Bissa says he remembers crying out for his mother. He broke his leg in the fall, but managed to crawl towards Camp IV.
Mount Everest took the lives of five of his team members in 1985 — two lives were lost in the 1984 expedition — but it spared Bissa, who didn’t let disappointment callus into resignation. He summitted the 20,000-ft Mt Thelu in Garwhal, joined the Tata Steel Adventure Foundation, where he worked under Pal, got married, and bided his time. Not even a serious battering to his body caused by a car accident dimmed his desire. “I remember telling the doctor that as soon as I’m out, I’m heading back,” says Bissa.
Captain Manmohan Singh Kohli, the leader of the first successful Indian expedition to Mount Everest in 1965, says that the pull of the summit doesn’t involve any mental processes; it is an out and out emotional response. “Each time I had a rough time up there, I’d promise myself I wouldn’t do it again. But as soon as I got back from an expedition, I would want to go back again,” says Kohli, who terms Bissa a sincere mountaineer but plainly and simply, an unlucky one. Soon enough Bissa was back on Everest in 1992, a year after his marriage, with a group of Indian civilian mountaineers. The expedition reached Camp IV when — and Bissa must have half-expected it — with a seemingly clockwork malevolence the mountain precipitated stormy weather and avalanches that took the lives of two members. Ultimately, the climbers had to turn back.
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Clockwise from top: Bissa was struck by mesenteric ischaemia on Everest last year; with son Rohitashwa in Nepal in the mid-90s; at a New Delhi hospital last month; with heroes Norgay; and Hillary; and crossing the Khumbu Icefall |
Seventeen years would pass before Bissa would decide that he had to try again. Last May he went up with a group of mountaineers from the Uttarkashi-based Nehru Institute of Mountaineering. It would be his last bid to scale Everest, he promised his wife Sushma, an avid mountaineer herself and who accompanied him on the expedition. Bissa and his fellow mountaineers reached as far as Camp III (24,000 ft) before he was struck by mesenteric ischaemia. Bissa and Sushma got back to the Everest base camp and were air-lifted to a Kathmandu hospital. Today, he is a vanquished man; he has lost 25 kilos, has had a fair bit of both his gangrenous intestines snipped off and lies before me with a number of tubes attached to his abdomen. “I thought this time ke chalo Pappu pass go gaya. The weather was brilliant, we were making rapid progress and I was very fit,” he says, with a wistful smile that dies young on his gaunt face. “Sometimes I think I shouldn’t have rescued Paljor in 1984.”
As Bissa gets wheeled out for a CT scan Sushma tells me that the first thing her husband asked the doctors at Kathmandu after his surgery there was whether he would be able to attempt Everest again. “During the early days of his treatment he would get angry when I would tell him that he shouldn’t have gone on the expedition, but now, he feels guilty about his pursuit sometimes.” The cost of Bissa’s treatment has run into over Rs 30 lakh and while both the Rajasthan government, the IMF and the Indian Army have chipped in, the family has had to cut corners elsewhere to try and ensure that the treatment continues unhindered. Bissa’s eldest son Rohitashwa, 18, has had to leave his boarding school in Dehradun and is now learning to manage his father’s business. “He would have liked to take up engineering, but with so much money going in for his treatment we don’t know whether it would be possible now."
As I prepare to leave Sushma hands me a visitor’s notebook, which is filled with exhortations and messages of hope from many legends of Indian mountaineering and the family’s other well-wishers. I write that Chomolungma (the Tibetan name for Everest, which stands for mother goddess of the earth) may not have allowed him to set foot on her summit, but she would undoubtedly see him through. As he reads the note, Bissa reveals a spiritual side to his egotistical, Nietzschean quest. “A lot of people have asked me about how I feel about Everest, there is no anger. But I always wonder why she has to do this to me. But remember that it was she, ye dharti ki devi (the goddess of Earth) who saved my life many times even when my fellow mountaineers lost their lives. She was the one who was with me during that storm in 1985 and gave me courage to crawl back to safety. So, I tell people, devi pe gussa kaise ho sakta hoon mein? (How can I be angry with a goddess?)”
Since Hillary and Norgay’s first successful ascent in 1953, over 2000 people have summitted the mountain (over 200 have lost their lives attempting it). These have included serious mountaineers and, of late, amateurs a little fitter than you and I. Bissa’s name, though, won’t be among theirs. His dogged and, at times, selfish pursuit of that small table-top of snow and rock 29,035 feet up in the atmosphere has left both his body and spirit bruised and with mounting debts and morbid regret. But as far as obsessions go, this courageous but bull-headed man couldn’t have been afflicted with a worthier one.
Donations for Bissa's ongoing treatment may be wired to his State Bank of Bikaner & Jaipur account at the Bikaner city branch (SB 61001858883).
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