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Touching
My Father's Soul : A Sherpa's Journey to the Top of
Everest by Jamling
Tenzing Norgay
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Touching
My Father's Soul : A Sherpa's Journey to the Top of
Everest
by
Jamling Tenzing Norgay,
Jon Krakauer (Introduction), His Holiness the
Dalai Lama |
TOUCHING
MY FATHER’S SOUL
By
Jamling Tenzing Norgay
INTRODUCTION
By
Jon Krakauer
Nearly
five years have passed since the disturbing cascade of
events that has come to be known as the 1996 Mount
Everest disaster. Hundreds of thousands of words on
the subject have been committed to print in the
interim. The most recent account of the tragedy,
Touching My Father’s Soul, by Jamling Tenzing
Norgay, is, by my rough calculation, the seventeenth
book to be published about it. A half-decade after the
fact, one would be forgiven for wondering why anybody
other than the most obsessive Everest fanatic should
bother reading yet another account of that infamous
season on the world’s highest mountain.
But
Jamling’s book should be read——it is in fact
among the best of the bunch. There is much to marvel
at in these pages. It taught me a great deal.
Jamling
was the Climbing Leader of the 1996 expedition that
made the hugely popular IMAX film, Everest. Although
most of the other accounts of the Everest disaster
were written by men and women who, like Jamling,
witnessed the catastrophe firsthand, this is the only
one authored by a Sherpa——the Buddhist people
whose homeland surrounds Mount Everest, and who have
played a singular, utterly crucial role in the great
peak’s mountaineering history since the British
first ventured onto its flanks in 1921.
Climbing
Everest has always been an exceedingly hazardous
undertaking, and the toll in Sherpa lives has from the
beginning been disproportionately high——in large
part because the non-Sherpa climbers responsible for
hiring them have routinely subjected their Sherpa
employees to significantly greater risks than they
have taken themselves. Nevertheless, this is just the
second book ever written about Himalayan
mountaineering written from a Sherpa’s point of
view. The only other, published thirty-seven years
ago, has long been out of print and is now difficult
to find. That book, as it happens, is the
autobiography of Jamling’s father, the late,
world-renowned Tenzing Norgay.
On
May 29, 1953, it was Tenzing who, in the company of a
New Zealand beekeeper, name of Ed Hillary, made the
first ascent of Everest. The 1996 tragedy provides the
narrative architecture that gives shape to Touching My
Father’s Soul, but, as this title suggests,
Jamling’s book is to no small degree about his
larger-than-life father and the complicated,
emotionally charged bond they shared. Its publication
seems especially propitious now that Tenzing’s
autobiography, Tiger of the Snows, has vanished from
bookstore shelves.
In
the heady months that followed his 1953 Everest climb,
Tenzing was catapulted to the loftiest reaches of
celebrity. He was lionized around the globe as one of
the preeminent heroes of the post–World War II era.
The newly crowned queen of England awarded the
thirty-nine-year-old Sherpa the George Medal, the
greatest honor that could be bestowed on a non-citizen
of the United Kingdom. Feted throughout the world, he
was befriended by the Indian prime minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru. Throngs of adoring Hindus, convinced
that Tenzing was a living embodiment of the deity
Shiva, made pilgrimages to the Norgay home. Born in
Tibet, raised in Nepal, and a resident of India since
the age of nineteen, he had become a symbol of hope
and inspiration for millions of caste-bound Indians,
poverty-stricken Nepalese, and politically oppressed
Tibetans——all of whom regarded him as a
countryman.
Thirteen
years after Tenzing stood atop Everest, Jamling was
born in Darjeeling. According to Jamling, the
relationship between father and son was
“old-fashioned——he was strict and
disciplined.” Jamling also reports that he and his
siblings came to understand at a very tender age that
their father wasn’t “an ordinary dad.” By this
time Tenzing’s celebrity had long since become a
burden, yet he considered fulfilling its obligations a
duty that could not be shirked. Toward that end, he
traveled prodigiously until his death in 1986, and his
presence in the household was missed acutely by young
Jamling. Tenzing left his family alone “for months
at a time,” recalls Jamling. “His absence was what
I resented when I was a boy——a boy who wanted to
join him and be with him.”
As
the son of such an eminent figure, Jamling, like his
two brothers, was sent to one of India’s most elite
private boarding schools, St. Paul’s. Everest loomed
large in Jamling’s imagination as he was growing up,
and he decided when still young that he would one day
emulate his father by climbing it. When he was
eighteen, with graduation from high school
approaching, Jamling had an opportunity to join an
Indian Everest expedition if he could convince his
father to pull the necessary strings. Tenzing refused,
sternly explaining, “I climbed Everest so that you
wouldn’t have to.” Jamling was crushed.
Upon
graduating from St. Paul’s, he traveled to the
United States to attend Northland College, in
Wisconsin, which had given his father an honorary
degree many years earlier. Jamling would spend the
next ten years in America, much of it in the flat
suburban sprawl of New Jersey——virtually as far
from the Himalaya as one can travel——but his dream
of climbing Everest never vacated his thoughts. On May
9, 1986, while Jamling was still enrolled at
Northland, he received word that his father had
abruptly collapsed and died. It was a severe blow to
the entire Norgay family, but, Jamling writes,
“after my father’s death, my desire to climb
Everest had only intensified.”
Ten
years later, Jamling was finally given an opportunity
to fulfill this long-deferred aspiration. The eminent
mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashears invited him
to join the 1996 IMAX expedition, and Jamling
accepted. His account of the ensuing events, including
the disaster, is enthralling to read, largely because
Jamling observes the behavior of his fellow climbers
from a rare, inimitable perspective: He was intimately
acquainted with both of the profoundly disparate
cultures that met——and more than occasionally
clashed——on the slopes of Everest that unfortunate
spring: the Sherpas’ on the one hand, and on the
other that of the wealthy “white eyes,” or mikaru
(as the Sherpas called us), who hired them to risk
their lives on our behalf.
The
extent to which Jamling’s life has straddled these
two wildly incongruent worlds is reinforced by
passages in the book that delineate his religious
beliefs. Like most Sherpas, he was raised as a
practicing Buddhist, but throughout his adolescence
and young adulthood, Jamling writes, “I imagined
that my propitiations were little more than
superstitious gestures…. Buddhism hadn’t fully
captured my heart. It wasn’t a subject taught at St.
Paul’s, and my father was off climbing and traveling
too much to teach me.” He admits to feeling
“cynical,” and “unsure of my belief in
Buddhism——skeptical, in fact,” right up until
the eve of the 1996 expedition. But then, arriving at
the foot of Everest, he found himself drawn with
surprising power by the traditions of his Buddhist
ancestors.
The
notorious storm that enveloped the peak on May 10,
leaving nine dead climbers in its wake, played no
small role in Jamling’s religious transformation.
“[O]nce I arrived in the lap of the mountain,” he
writes, “surrounded by Sherpas who believed, and
confronted by a rich history of death——and death
itself——I could no longer remain cynical.”
Touching
My Father’s Soul is thus a story of spiritual
evolution, with its concurrent struggles, failings,
and irreconcilable contradictions. But more than that,
it is the story of a son’s quest to make things
right with a father who was both a living legend and a
painfully fleeting presence, and who died when the son
was still teetering on the cusp of adulthood. Probing
his own heart, Jamling asks, “What, honestly, was my
motivation to climb [Everest]? For my teammates the
expedition was somewhere between a job and recreation,
and those forces were drawing me, too. But I was
driven primarily by a need for understanding. I felt
that only by following my father up the mountain, by
standing where he had stood, by climbing where he had
climbed, could I truly learn about him. I wanted to
know what it was that drove him and what it was he had
learned. Only then would I be able to assemble all the
missing parts of a father’s life that a young man
envisions and longs for but never formally
inherits.”
Jon
Krakauer February
2001
What
others have to say about: Touching
My Father's Soul : A Sherpa's Journey to the Top of
Everest by Jamling
Tenzing Norgay, Jon
Krakauer (Introduction), His
Holiness the Dalai Lama
“Tenzing
Norgay Sherpa was more than a highly motivated man.
His first ascent of Chomolungma is a story of passion,
hardship and endurance. In this book, his son
Jamling engagingly illustrates his own passion to
follow his father's route -- and his father's dreams
-- to the roof of the world.”
—Reinhold
Messner
“There
is much to marvel at in these page. It taught me
a great deal....Enthralling to read.”
—Jon
Krakauer
“Jamling
brought companionship and humanity to Mount Everest in
1996. I came to greatly respect his
professionalism, good humor and deeply spiritual
nature. While we reached the top together, in
this book Jamling has gone beyond the summit. He
has successfully reached into our hearts, our souls
and our dreams. I am delighted and proud
that he has given us this insightful meditation on
climbing, spirituality and life -- a breath-taking and
inspiring view from the other side of the mountain.”
—David
Breashears
“Jamling
Tenzing Norgay has given us a moving and deeply
personal account of his life as a modern young man in
the ancient family of the Sherpas. His pilgrimage to
the top of the world reunites him spiritually with his
famous father, the legendary Tenzing Norgay, and along
the way he teaches us all the enduring lessons of
faith and the humility evoked by high and wild
places.”
—Tom
Brokaw
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Touching
My Father's Soul : A Sherpa's Journey to the Top of
Everest by Jamling
Tenzing Norgay, Jon
Krakauer (Introduction), His
Holiness the Dalai Lama |
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