BackDeath and revival in the mountains
Their husbands went missing in the Himalayas. Over the years, the two women have forged a deep bond with high places, and each other
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The tickets have been bought, and the route maps drawn. The finer details of the arduous nine-day trek to Roopkund, Uttarakhand, in October are still being worked out.
It will be yet another mountain adventure for Malabika Sadhu, 46, and Ivy Banerjee, 43. They will trek up to nearly 16,000ft: past the sparkling Neel Ganga river, through oak forests and blossoming rhododendron, beyond the stunning Ali Bugyal meadow, and up a long, icy trail to Bhugubasa.
The Trishul mountains will soar above them almost throughout the trek. When they finally reach the small, green oval of Roopkund lake, the cold, windswept beauty of the place, they know, will be suffused by the stillness of a deathly past.
Scattered around the lake are human bones—skulls, tibia, vertebrae and femur. Local folklore and mythology connected to the legend of the goddess Nanda Devi assign a plethora of reasons for this, but the one most widely accepted is that these are the remains of pilgrims, dating back almost a thousand years.
It is a chilling reminder of human mortality. When I meet the two women at the Indian Coffee House in Jadavpur, Kolkata, I gently bring up the subject of death.
In 2001, Malabika lost her mountaineer husband, Sarbajit, while he was attempting to climb the 7,138m, or 23,419ft, Chaukhamba I in the Gangotri region of Uttarakhand. Ivy lost her husband Arijit, also a mountaineer, two years later on the Kedar Dome, a 6,830m peak, not very far from where Sarbajit was killed. Their bodies are yet to be found. Both men were 33.
The two women—both of whom were introduced to trekking by their husbands—met and forged a relationship pivoted on their personal tragedies. After Arijit went missing, Ivy sought out Malabika through friends in the mountaineering circle, hoping to meet someone who knew what she was going through. Since then, they have journeyed within; gaining strength in support from each other. And they have journeyed out; together they have reached out to the mountains again, completing multiple high-altitude treks, including to sites close to where their husbands went missing.
In 2008, Malabika went back to the Chaukhamba region with Ivy and another woman friend. The last time she was there, it was to complete the formalities after her husband went missing. This time, Malabika went all the way to the base camp. It was a long, arduous trek and the upper reaches of the peak remained hidden from view even from the base camp, at around 17,000ft. Only on reaching the usual site for Camp 1 could one get a full view. “It was possible to go till Camp 1 without hard-core technical climbing. I wanted to push forward, see the spot from where the white-out was reported and an avalanche swept Sarbajit away. But the porters refused," says Malabika. Standing at the base camp, Malabika could feel the glacier move, hear it crack open; and she peered into the dark, bottomless crevasses. Thin slates of ice drew a line between life and death.
Ivy too had been drawn to Kedar Dome, where her husband went missing, but knew the futility of a search. “At those altitudes, even a day lost is a day too late," she says. In the recent past, newspaper reporters have upset her by asking whether she still lives in the hope that her husband will return. “Am I mad or what? Do you have any idea how much the terrain changes every hour in those extreme altitudes?" says Ivy.
Bodies, of course, have been recovered from mountains years later. The icy terrain preserves the bodies it claims. George Mallory’s body was recovered in 1999, 75 years after he went missing on Mount Everest, by a research expedition which wanted to find out if Mallory and fellow mountaineer Andrew Irvine were the first to reach the Everest summit. It became international news.
Miracles, too, have been occasionally reported from the mountains. Among the most startling tales of survival is that of Joe Simpson. In 1985, two experienced English mountaineers, Simon Yates and Simpson, successfully climbed the 21,000ft Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. On the way down, with darkness and a storm fast approaching, Simpson broke his leg. Every attempt to move him down having failed, Yates had to make a difficult choice: They could die together or he could cut Simpson’s end of the rope. He opted for the latter and Simpson’s injured body, no longer anchored, fell into a 150ft crevasse. Though he presumed his partner to be dead, Yates hung around at the base camp for three days, till a yell in the night woke him up—Simpson was alive. He had drawn on the last of his body’s reserves to crawl out of the crevasse.
For the two Kolkata women—Ivy is a Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) agent and Malabika is currently an unemployed schoolteacher—the reality is one of lack of resources, funds and contacts. They console themselves with the fact that “the mountains aren’t guilty". “We have seen from close quarters how the Himalayas can besot men like Arijit and Sarbajit. If he could, he would have married a mountain. It was always his first love," says Ivy, laughing.
“They will leave everything in the world to climb mountains. We might call them irresponsible, but they are just addicts of nature and high places," Malabika adds. Arijit, she later found out, was advised against the Chaukhamba expedition by mountaineering veterans because there was a possibility of bad weather.
At Malabika’s home in Behala, her elderly mother and occasional travel companion puts her own worries in perspective. “My daughter loves going on high-altitude treks and it’s not that I don’t worry. After all, our tragedy is always at the back of my mind. But I let her go since travelling, seeing new places and meeting new people, is essential for her mind too."
Ivy and Malabika have been on numerous trekking expeditions, mostly travelling as a team of women. Between the two of them, they have been all over the Indian Himalayas: Tapovan, Kedar Tal, Amarnath, Bagini glacier, Goecha La, Neora Valley, four of the Panch Kedar treks, Pindari glacier and Kafni glacier, among others.
“Sometimes, on trekking routes we are stopped by male villagers who ask, ‘Aap akele kyon (why are you travelling alone)?’, obviously wondering at the lack of male presence in our team. We laugh and tell them we aren’t alone," says Malabika.
For Malabika, as a solo woman trekker, it was an emboldening experience. Like another occasion in 2006, when she, along with another woman traveller, found the roof of their tent caving in after heavy snowfall, during a trek to the Bagini glacier. Later, when the weather improved, she stepped out to a gloriously moonlit night, the light of the full moon radiating off the fresh snow.
Through mountains, Malabika and Ivy have found a place for self-realization. They have sought relief in its folds: the only way they could contemplate a life that rises above the daily struggle of the city or their shared grief. “It is only when you are returning by train that all the worries come back," says Malabika.
Ivy doesn’t see her mountain expeditions “as an escape", or even something that will constantly remind her of the tragedy of 2003. “Say, your roommate for many years got run over by a car on Park Street," she says, referring to one of Kolkata’s busiest streets. “You will feel bad but can you avoid the place forever?"
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