The Everest Files (7 page)

Kami chose his moment with care, a Saturday free from work when he hoped his father would be receptive to a conversation. The formal way he phrased the request caused his father to raise an eyebrow in surprise. But he took Kami to the family room where they could talk in peace.

‘I guess you want to talk about Laxmi,' his father began.

‘Yes, sir, I do.'

‘Well it's very simple. You've got to keep to the pact and that's the end of the story.'

‘I've been having other thoughts,' Kami said hesitantly.

‘Well put them out of your head. Families have been making marriage pacts like this for centuries and there's no need to change things.'

‘But, sir, I don't feel happy … '

‘You will feel happy. Once you have Laxmi living at your side. She's a fine girl and you are lucky to have her promise. Look at me and your mother, married by a similar pact and we've never had a bad word between us.'

It was the argument Kami had most feared, for it was indisputably true; his mother and father were indeed happy together – living proof that a marriage pact could work.

If the circumstances were right.

But his situation was different, Kami reminded himself. The circumstances were most certainly not right. He had to tell his father the truth about Shreeya, but he knew by doing so he would be drawing the conversation in a most dangerous direction.

And how to find the words?

Kami had been raised in the traditional manner of a Nepali family. Rigid social codes dictated the way that men behaved towards women, children towards elders. Obedience to his father was absolutely at the core of who he was and he had never imagined a scenario in which he could disobey him.

But now that moment had come and Kami felt the exquisite pain of something stretching and breaking inside him as he said the next words.

‘I don't want to make my life with Laxmi.'

These words provoked exactly the reaction Kami had feared. The look of fury in his father's eyes was truly terrifying. For a terrible moment he thought he would lash out with his fists.

‘It's Shreeya who has put you up to this!' his father raged. ‘Don't think I don't know. The whole village knows about you two.'

‘It's not her.' Kami was mortified that his father was trying to twist the blame. ‘This is my decision.'

‘I should talk to her father. Get her sent away.'

Kami felt his guts churn as this new threat. How stupid of him not to think of it. It would be easy for his father to arrange. Get Shreeya's family to send her away to some far off place, marry her swiftly to someone else.

‘You wouldn't do that.'

‘Wouldn't I? It's no more than you both deserve.' His father spat the words.

‘Is there no other way?' Kami asked, ‘Something we can do to break the contract?'

‘
Break the contract?
Who has put such thoughts in your head?'

‘If we repay the dowry? Surely there is a way?'

‘You don't know what you are talking about. Her family and our family have been trading for generations. There's more at stake than just this marriage.'

‘But it
can
happen,' Kami insisted. ‘Plenty of people have told me so. If Chandra agrees a price.'

‘Alright,' he conceded, finally, ‘It can happen that the contract is annulled. But normally it happens because of a terrible sickness, or a death in the family, or some other tragedy.'

Kami's father put his head in his hands. He looked so close to absolute despair that for a moment Kami was almost tempted to retract everything he had said, so deeply did he want to free his father from the pain.

But something held him back.

‘Tell me how you feel about this girl Shreeya,' his father said at last.

Kami looked at him directly, surprised to find that at this crucial moment, he did not feel any shame or doubt.

‘I love her, sir. And I will love her for the rest of my life.'

Kami felt his father's eyes bore in to him. Such a gaze would normally make him flinch but at that moment he found he could hold the eye contact without fear, for the statement he had just made had come from his heart.

‘We have to do it,' Kami implored. ‘Please, father, I beg you.'

His father stood, stepping to the window and looking out across the fields of maize and rice. He sighed deeply and Kami sensed that he had reached a decision.

‘I won't get involved in this. I don't agree with any of it,' his father said emphatically. ‘If anyone is to try and break the contract it is up to you alone. But I warn you that Chandra is a tough man. He might throw you out of the window rather than listen to such talk.'

Kami's father cut the conversation at that point and a period of a few days followed in which Kami hardly slept at all.

Three days later Kami arrived at Laxmi's family home.

His stomach was tied in knots. It was the first time he had been to the house and he guessed it would be the last. He announced himself to Laxmi's seventeen-year-old brother and waited until her father Chandra returned from the fields.

The man greeted Kami with a courteous ‘Namaste' before retreating to the yard to wash away the dust and dirt of a hard day tilling the soil. When he came back, Kami was literally shaking with fear; the moment had come and he had no idea how things would work out.

‘I imagine you are here to discuss Laxmi,' Chandra said, fixing Kami with a cool gaze. ‘Are you ready to take her to your home?'

A silence fell as Kami wondered how to respond. He had rehearsed these words a thousand times but now it came to the moment he felt tongue tied and lost.

‘I cannot take Laxmi to my house, sir. I … I wish to make my home with another.'

The words caused an instant shift of mood. A dark shadow swept across Chandra's face. Laxmi's father was now staring at him with ill-disguised contempt.

‘I … It's something that I've thought about most seriously, sir.'

Kami wilted under his acid gaze, he saw himself as a pathetic child next to this experienced and widely respected man. What right did he have to enter his house as the bearer of such news?

It was wrong.

But not as wrong as marrying without love.

‘What does your father say?' Chandra snapped.

‘He says it is not my business to try and change things.'

Laxmi's father nodded.

‘So why don't you listen to him? Do you not respect the wishes of your own father?'

‘Yes, sir, I do. But no matter how much I love and honour him, I cannot marry Laxmi.'

‘But you are
already
married to my daughter,' Laxmi's father replied indignantly. ‘You speak of it as some future event but it happened many years ago and you must honour it.'

‘Sir, the truth is this; my heart belongs to another.'

At that all the blood ran out of the old man's face and he looked truly desperate.

‘Everything is arranged!' he hissed, ‘The dowry has been paid many years ago and I cannot afford another. If you don't take her no-one else will.'

‘And if I repay the dowry?'

Chandra gave a bitter laugh;

‘You? Who earns nothing?'

‘I have work with an expedition, sir. To Everest. Earning dollars.' Kami told him.

Chandra looked unimpressed with this. ‘You'll lose it playing cards and drinking beer,' he said scornfully, ‘like all the young guys do.'

‘No, sir. I swear I will save every last cent. All of that money will go towards paying back the dowry.'

Laxmi's father stared long and hard at Kami.

‘I cannot go through with this marriage, sir,' Kami told him insistently. ‘This is the only path and I swear on my life that you will be paid what you desire.'

A glimmer of resignation flickered across Chandra's face. It seemed he saw something unmoveable in Kami's expression. He sighed deeply and went to the window where he stood for a long while. When he turned back, Kami was horrified to see a tear glistening on the man's cheek.

‘You will have to repay the dowry threefold,' Chandra said wearily. ‘But if you fail to do so before Laxmi's sixteenth birthday then I will hold you to the marriage contract and you will take her to your house.'

‘Thank you sir.' Kami bowed deeply to Chandra and walked down the stairs in a daze. As he left the house he heard the sound of wailing from an upstairs window.

Laxmi had been told.

He could not feel sorry for her. If he could pay back the dowry and the extra sum her father had demanded, she would be free to marry again. And maybe she would find someone who would really love her.

Surely like that her life would be more complete?

As he walked back to his village Kami thought about the figure that Laxmi's father had mentioned.

Three times the dowry.

It was an enormous sum. Even the briefest mental calculation revealed how hopeless the situation really was. Kami had mentioned the dollars he would earn on the Everest expedition but the reality was that he would have to work on two or three such trips to save such a fortune.

It was an overwhelming thought and it left Kami with no peace of mind.

Luckily, at that time, the Everest expedition was approaching fast and Jamling invited him to attend a climbing camp he had organised on one of the Khumbu's many glaciers.

Kami was jubilant; the ten-day course was a final chance to practise his climbing techniques. He worked hard, perfecting the skills he would need on the great peak and proving himself to be a natural at ice-climbing and rope work.

When he got back home – with four weeks to go to the expedition – he continued his physical training, loading up his rucksack with two huge slabs of slate and yomping up and down the steepest slope he could find until he was panting with exhaustion.

He hoped it would be enough; he knew that Everest Sherpas were famed throughout the world for their speed, strength and endurance. Jamling was taking a gamble to bring him along on the expedition and he wanted to make him proud.

Late at night, working by hurricane lantern with Shreeya at his side, he would practise his English. Jamling's advice on this had also struck home; he knew that he would never be allowed to go high on the mountain if he couldn't communicate properly with the clients.

Shreeya was a hard taskmaster but a good teacher; eight years of schooling had given her almost perfect English and she was quick to pick Kami up on his errors.

Shortly before Kami left, Shreeya fixed a surprise; the local school owned several small digital cameras and Shreeya had arranged for one to be loaned to Kami for the Everest expedition. One of the teachers quickly taught him how to use it.

Shreeya looked on proudly, but also with regret. She knew that the time of parting was nearly upon them.

Finally, the moment came. Kami packed his few belongings in a tatty old canvas rucksack and waited in the yard of the house for the family to gather.

His father held him by the shoulders, ‘You have a great opportunity,' he said, ‘The first of our family to have the honour to go to Sagarmatha.'

Kami nodded. He felt tears welling up and didn't trust himself to speak. His mother took his hand and squeezed it, a rare show of affection.

‘Make us proud, Kami,' she said.

‘I will try,' Kami promised.

Then he strapped on his pack and turned to go, walking away from the village of his birth, heading for the trails which would lead ever upwards to the village of Lukla and the rendezvous with the expedition.

A short time later an elegant figure slipped from the shadows of a field of tall maize and joined him on the track. It was Shreeya, come to accompany him for the first stage of the journey.

They walked side by side, through terraced valleys where tender shoots of rice were sprouting in the spring sunshine. The world was coming alive after the frigid embrace of winter and great flights of snowcocks were flying in from the south.

The further they got from the village the more the heavy shroud of responsibility seemed to lift. Trekking through unknown villages, they felt free, invisible even. For that one day it was as if Laxmi and the marriage pact did not exist at all.

Neither of them really wanted to stop. It felt like they could just keep walking forever.

Kami begged Shreeya to return before she was missed but she insisted on spending one last night together. They built a fire in the forest and baked wild apples in the coals. Later, wrapped in Kami's coarse blanket, their body heat keeping out the chill night air, they held each closer than they had ever done before.

They parted the following morning, on a high col where wild flowers filled the air with perfume. That was when Shreeya gave Kami her parting gift; the little bronze shrine bell that had been a part of her family home for so many years.

‘This was given to me as a birth present,' she told him shyly. ‘Place it on the summit, if the gods will allow.'

Greatly moved, Kami held the little bell in his hands, already aware of the enormity of the gesture. Placing this devotion in the home of the gods would be the ultimate holy act.

A tribute from both of them and a symbol of hope for the future.

If he could do it.

Kami reached Lukla on the third day of his trek. Normally he was here with his father, an outsider come to trade, and he had always loved the bustle and colour of this busy market town. This time he was here on his own, with a certain strut to his stride – he was here to be a part of an Everest
expedition
.

He was bursting with pride.

He asked around for Jamling and was directed to a certain guest house in the high part of town.

‘You're bang on time,' Jamling told him, ‘The work's just beginning!'

He guided Kami to a small field where the expedition was readying itself for departure. Kami had never seen such an incredible mess in his life – it looked like a hurricane had ripped through a refugee camp. There were scattered piles of yak fodder, teetering towers of tinned food and, spread out in the sun, just about every variety of tent known to man.

And rope; everywhere, rope! Rope hanging from the trees. Rope drying on the walls. Red rope. Yellow rope. New rope. Old rope. Thousands upon thousands of metres of rope.

As for the Sherpa team, they paid Kami little attention, but didn't seem surprised to have him around. They chatted quietly between themselves as they worked, catching up with news after weeks or months of rest since their last expedition.

‘You have to meet the Sirdar,' Jamling told him, ‘his name's Tenzing – named after the first Sherpa to climb the great mountain. Seven times Everest summit.'

Seven times to the summit of Everest! Kami wondered at the superhuman powers such a man must have.

They tracked Tenzing down in a local store, where he was bargaining for sacks of flour. He was younger than Kami had imagined, perhaps only thirty, but his eyes were those of an older and more experienced man.

His nose was oddly shaped, the tip missing and the surrounding tissue puckered with scar tissue. It gave him a grizzled look, rather scary, and Kami wondered if it was another form of frostbite injury.

‘This is the lad I told you about,' Jamling told him.

The Sirdar gave Kami an appraising look, slapping him hard on the back and pinching the lad's bicep in a vice like grip.

‘Good enough,' Tenzing nodded. ‘Take these sacks of flour back to the base.'

The two men left Kami to the job, a simple task which left him with his face and hair covered with white flour.

Then he was told to report to Lopsang, the ‘second Sirdar' and Kami's direct boss. He was a slightly chubby man, with a deadpan expression and a twinkle in his eye. Unlike Tenzing, he had never summitted Everest, but had vast experience as a quartermaster and the type of logistical mind needed to keep an expedition fed, housed and watered for three long months.

‘You need to check all these tents,' he told Kami. ‘Put them up. Check the seams. Repair the holes. Count the pegs.'

He showed Kami an impressive pile of tents.

‘If there's anything you can't repair, let me know,' he said, as he moved off to attend to other matters.

Kami found a vacant scrap of ground and emptied the contents of one of the stuff sacks out. A bewildering stash of gear fell at his feet.

Kami had put up tents on his previous expeditions but these looked different.

Luckily, Nima, one of the other Sherpa lads, came over to help Kami out.

‘Let me give you a hand,' he said good naturedly. ‘You obviously don't know your ass from your elbow.'

Nima showed him how to assemble the carbon fibre poles and thread them through the correct guides in the fabric.

‘Quite easy,' Kami observed.

‘Wait 'til you try that in a force ten storm at eight thousand metres,' Nima laughed. ‘Then you'll see if it's easy or not.'

‘Have you been to Everest before?' Kami asked him shyly.

‘Twice. Once to the summit last year,' Nima told him with considerable pride and, with that, left Kami mulling over his response.

Twice to Everest!
And Nima really didn't look much older than seventeen. Kami felt intensely jealous of such a wealth of experience, but he had liked Nima and he reckoned they would become friends.

The work went on. Many of the tents were veterans of previous expeditions and there was plenty of damage to repair with special glue. A surly-looking lad called Pemba was ordered to work with Kami, but Kami didn't like him much; all he seemed to do was boast about all the girlfriends he had.

As they worked, Kami noticed that a number of youths were hanging around outside the compound walls. They were strong looking boys, fifteen or sixteen years old, and they were eager to strike up a conversation with anyone working in the compound.

‘Those lads are looking for work,' Lopsang told him when he came to inspect the progress, ‘Some of them wait for years before they get a break. Some never get a break at all.'

Kami eyed the gathered boys, wondering, not for the first time, at his luck. Why was he the one that had been favoured by the gods? Why was it him who had the job with the expedition? Was it a reward for his years of prayer? Or just down to chance?

Maybe the answer would come during the expedition, he thought. A pleasing idea.

Gradually Kami and Pemba worked their way through the pile of tents. By nightfall their fingers were cramped up and their eyes were red and raw from the fumes.

‘You sniffed so much glue today you probably flew over the summit,' Lopsang laughed. ‘Come and get some supper, you've earned it.'

Kami was grateful for the break and he wolfed down the rice and sauce, watching the vast piles of equipment as they were gradually sorted and packed into barrels.

As the most junior member of the team, Kami wasn't entitled to a tent of his own. Instead he was given a sleeping bag and told to bunk down in the mess tent. He wasn't alone; five or six of the other younger Sherpas had the same quarters.

It was hard to relax. The tent was fuggy with cigarette smoke and a few of the Sherpas were sitting at the table drinking chang and playing cards.

The bag smelled a bit sweaty but it was warm. Lulled by the gentle chatter of the men, Kami finally felt himself slipping into a deep and dreamless sleep.

The kerosene cooker flared into life just before 6 a.m. Kami stumbled out into a misty dawn and went to wash. He had to break a thin glaze of ice that had formed on the washing bowl but the bitingly cold water was deliciously fresh on his skin.

Back in the tent, handfuls of cheap black Indian tea were thrown into boiling water. Kami was given a chipped tin mug of it and he added a couple of spoonfuls of sugar for good measure.

Just after 8 a.m. a throaty siren blasted off down at the airstrip.

‘That's the boss flying in!' Tenzing announced.

Kami and Nima bolted down the last of their breakfast chapattis and followed the Sirdar down to the runway. As they approached, the hornet buzz of an incoming aircraft was echoing around the walls of the valley.

Kami had seen aeroplanes passing overhead in his village but never at close hand. The shiny green and white turbo prop that finally bounced onto the runway seemed to him more like a toy than anything, dwarfed as it was by the stupendous snow-dusted walls that surrounded the town.

A film crew exited the aircraft, scurrying towards the front of the plane to frame up a shot before yelling back.

‘OK. We're rolling.'

That was the cue for Alex Brennan to make his entrance, stepping confidently from the cabin of the little plane and moving swiftly to shake hands with a row of local dignitaries who had turned out to greet him.

‘That's the boss,' Tenzing said to Kami.

Kami was impressed by his first view of Alex Brennan; he was a physically imposing figure already dressed for the high mountains.

‘Hi guys.' Brennan shook hands with each of the waiting Sherpas. ‘Good to see you all.'

Other Westerners were brought over to meet the Sherpa team; the two-man film crew, a pretty female journalist called Sasha, and a couple of burly, unsmiling characters who were introduced only as ‘friends' of the boss.

It should have taken five minutes to walk from the airfield to the town, but in fact it took almost an hour. News of Alex Brennan's arrival had spread like wildfire and a whole bunch of trekkers, for the most part American, were keen to shake his hand and have a photo taken with the great man.

‘A pleasure to meet you, ma'am. Thank you for your kind words. A pleasure to meet you, sir … ' And so it went on, with well-wishers from Texas, from Illinois, from Montana and Oregon.

Brennan was the personification of charm, pressing the flesh with practised ease and seeming to have time for everyone. Kami sensed that there was a genuine excitement in the air; these people really
liked
Alex Brennan, they
believed
in him, trusted him.

‘Why does he need to come to Everest?' Kami whispered to Tenzing. He seemed to be a man who already had everything.

‘Publicity!' Tenzing exclaimed with a laugh. ‘Perhaps he wants to be even more famous.'

There was only one slightly strange thing that Kami noticed – the two burly Americans who had arrived with Brennan on the aircraft were hovering right next to him as he met the trekkers.

‘Bodyguards,' Pemba suggested with a tingle of excitement, ‘maybe they have guns.'

‘Why?' Kami questioned, ‘What are they afraid of?'

‘I don't know, terrorists, assassins, kidnappers.'

‘But why would anyone want to hurt him?'

‘Think about it,' Tenzing replied, ‘he's rich, he's famous all over America, maybe one day he'll even be the president. There are plenty of crazy people who would like to kill someone like that.'

‘But not in Nepal.' Kami could not imagine that any Nepali would ever seek to harm someone like Alex Brennan.

‘No. But they can't take any chances.'

Finally, they made it to the field where the expedition convoy was preparing for departure. Yaks were loaded up and one hour later they were all set.

The expedition filed out of Lukla as the trek to Base Camp began.

The first couple of hours went smoothly, the Westerners leading on, chatting excitedly and snapping away on their cameras, and the Sherpas and pack animals following behind. In addition to the load on his back, Kami was in charge of three of the heavily-laden yaks, urging them forward with a mixture of guttural cries and the occasional well-aimed rock.

The film crew were shooting almost constantly, framing up shots at scenic turns of the trail and firing questions spontaneously at the Sherpas when the mood took them.

Kami found George the cameraman walking alongside him with the camera running.

‘How does it feel to have so much weight on your back?' George asked.

‘Not so bad. I do it every day,' Kami replied with a smile.

The truth was that Kami had little energy to waste on conversation. He was carrying two kit bags, a total weight of almost forty kilos, and his legs were feeling it with every step.

A couple of hours from Lukla the expedition passed through a small village which had suffered a recent tragedy: a landslide had ripped out a large chunk of hillside, sweeping houses and fields away in an avalanche of boulders, mud and splintered trees.

‘I want some shots of this,' Alex Brennan told the camera team, ‘This is the reality of life in the Himalaya.'

Brennan led the camera crew up the slope, filming as they went while he gave a running commentary on the devastation.

‘This is the remains of someone's house. You can see clothes and other personal stuff in the wreckage here. I can see a doll. A broken cot. I shudder to think how many people must have died in this landslide.'

Kami and a few of the other Sherpas followed on reluctantly, carrying the film crew's spare flight cases and an extra tripod. The air smelled bacterial, of musty churned earth and crushed bark with, here and there, the unmistakeable stench of decomposition.

‘We shouldn't be here,' Tenzing muttered. ‘Disturbing the spirits.'

Kami nodded his agreement.

Further up the scarred section of mountain they came across a lone man toiling amidst the debris. Filthy from head to foot, he was evidently bone tired, pulling broken roof beams from the debris field.

‘This is incredible,' Brennan said to camera, ‘this man is actually rebuilding his house with his own bare hands. That just tells you everything you need to know about the spirit of the Sherpa people.'

Faced with this unexpected invasion, the man just stared at them all with a bewildered look on his face. Kami felt very sorry for him.

‘We're going to help this guy out,' Brennan said suddenly. ‘I want you Sherpas to give me a hand.'

So saying, Alex Brennan stripped off to the waist and began hauling rocks onto the platform. The Sherpas just stood there, part ashamed by this unexpected display of human flesh, and part dumbstruck to see that Alex Brennan owned a torso that wouldn't have looked out of place in a bodybuilders' convention.