n 2011, twenty four
year old Arunima Sinha was thrown off a moving train by thugs for refusing to
hand over the gold chain she was wearing. She lost her left leg when a train
went over it. While dealing with pitying murmurs of, “Who will marry you now,” and
the absurd conspiracy theories that followed, she made a decision. She would
climb Mount Everest. In 2013 she did just that, becoming the world’s first
female amputee, and the first Indian amputee, to achieve this feat. Earlier
this year she was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in
India. This May marks the second anniversary of her reaching Everest’s summit.
In honour of this phenomenal accomplishment, Arunima Sinha spoke to
YourStory about that ill-fated train trip, the hell that followed, why she
decided to climb Everest and how it is in the worst tragedies that the human
spirit learns to soar. The heroine’s story, in her own words:
Early life
Receiving the Padma Shri from president Pranab Mukherjee
There’s a small
district 200 kilometres outside of Lucknow called Ambedkarnagar. That’s where I
am from. My father was an engineer in the army and my mother a supervisor with
the health department. He passed away when I was three. I have an elder sister
and a little brother. Upon my father’s death, my sister’s husband, whom we
fondly call Bhai Sahib, became the family’s de facto patriarch.
Everyone in my
family enjoys sports and I was naturally athletic as a child, though I never
had any professional aspirations for the same. I have been cycling since I can
remember, loved playing football and was a national level volleyball player.
But sports took a backseat when my job hunt started. I studied law after my
post-graduation and was confident about getting started on a robust career. But
everyone feels the sting of unemployment at some point in their lives. This
time I was at its receiving end.
The job hunt
Bhai sahib
suggested I apply at the Paramilitary Force in the army, saying that this way I
could stay close to my beloved sports while earning a living at the same time.
Despite many heartfelt tries, I didn’t get through. The job search was not
panning out as I expected and I was getting desperate. In 2011, I applied at
CSIF. When I got the call letter I saw they had got my birth date wrong.
Determined not to lose out on a good opportunity due to this technical error, I
decided to leave for Delhi immediately to get it rectified. I was confident
that once this was done, I would get the job.
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The day life changed forever
I got on the
general compartment of the Padmavat Express. The crowd was crushing, but I
squeezed myself into a corner seat. Preoccupied with thoughts about the future,
I was startled when some four or five thugs gathered around me and started
pulling at the only thing of value I had on that day- a gold chain gifted to me
by my mother. Criminals getting on in general compartments in U.P. is, believe
it or not, quite common. Being a single female traveller, they thought me an
easy prey. When I refused to hand the chain over, they started coming at me one
at a time. I kicked, punched and fought as best as I could. For a brief moment,
it even seemed I had the upper hand. The compartment was full of people, but no
one came to the rescue of a girl being robbed and attacked. Since they couldn’t
take me on one at a time, each grabbed a limb and hauled me out the train.
I flew into an
oncoming train and the force threw me onto the opposite tracks. What happened
thereafter took a matter of seconds. Before I could move my left leg off the
track, a train went over it.
The night that wouldn’t end
Much later, when
Mahila Ayog demanded a report, it was discovered that 49 trains had passed me
by as I lay wrecked and bleeding on the tracks. Rodents would come and feast on
my oozing wounds, scampering off when trains came. I kept screaming in pain
before finally passing out. Looking back, I really wonder how I managed to hold
on for so long. I never thought I would survive that night. But when morning
dawned, renewed hope surged through me.
Arunima's memoirs,
aptly titled, 'Born again on the mountain: A story of losing everything and
finding it back'
Open tracks
transform into public toilets for poor villagers who have nowhere else to
defecate. The next morning when the lads came to take a dump, the sight of my
mangled body greeted them. I was to be taken to the Bareilly District Hospital.
But the move involved so many bureaucratic hurdles from disinterested
government employees that I was left on the platform for hours before being
taken to the hospital.
My leg had to be
amputated from below the knee immediately to prevent gangrene from setting in.
I was losing blood alarmingly. Here that I was informed that the hospital was
out of anaesthesia. With no choice, I instructed them to go ahead with the
amputation. The limb was sawed off while I was fully conscious. The hospital
staff were severely encumbered by the lack of supplies, but did everything in
their power to make my suffering lessen. The pharmacist B.C. Yadav donated his
own blood because there was none to spare. To give you an idea of the kind of
hospital and place it was, I need to mention this. After the amputation, as I
lay in the OT, a street dog ventured into the room and started feasting on the
leg that had just been removed from my body.
Uproar
While I was
fighting for my life, unbeknownst to me, outside I had become a media
sensation. Newspapers and TV channels picked up my story and reported on the
gory details. It is outrageous that a young girl travelling alone can be thrown
off the train just like that. Both the UP and the national government got
involved. Ajay Maken, the then sports minister, arranged for me to be shifted
to AIIMS where I was assured to receive world class care. For my distraught
family, this provided some temporary relief. What I didn’t know then was the
worst was yet to come.
Scapegoat
Initially my story
was being pawned by the state and national governments because of the sympathy
votes it could help garner. Then it took a murky turn. When my story captured
national attention, questions began to be asked that who was responsible for my
accident and who all should be held accountable. It’s not that someone was out
to get me, but everyone wanted to save themselves. In the mad scramble to avoid
the blame that followed, the easiest scapegoat was me. First stories started
circulating that I was travelling without a ticket and had jumped to avoid
being caught by the ticket collector. A CCTV footage showed me standing in a
queue to purchase the ticket. With this theory invalidated, even louder claims
that I wanted to commit suicide started doing the rounds. I could have been
shouting my innocence from the rooftops, but it would not have made a difference.
A decision
Lying there on the
hospital bed, when I was at my weakest and most vulnerable, I felt helpless to
defend myself and my family against this onslaught. I said to no one in
particular, “Today is your day. Bark whatever you want. But someday I will
prove, without a doubt, the truth of what happened to me.” My left leg was
amputated. A rod was inserted in my right leg, from knee to ankle, to hold the
shattered bones together. I pondered on the most impossible dream I could set
for myself. I decided to climb the Everest.
Why Everest
Every girl cannot
climb the Everest to prove herself right. But for me it was never a choice. The
public imagination had reduced me to either a victim or an attempted suicide
case. This was the only way I could reclaim my voice. When I tried to tell my
doctors about my plan, there were two reactions. If I tried to discuss my plan
with anyone, either I was laughed off or told that trauma had affected my
mental health adversely.
The view from the top of the world: Everest
Usually amputee
patients take months, or even years, to get accustomed to their prosthetic
limbs. I walked in two days. The mind holds tremendous sway over the body. Once
I had decided that this is what I would do, I let nothing get the better of me.
Straight out of the hospital I went to see Bachendri Pal, the first Indian
woman to climb Everest. Aside from my immediate family, she was the only person
to not dismiss my mission. But she didn’t sugar coat it either. She told me,
“Arunima in this condition you made such a huge decision. Know that you have
already conquered your inner Everest. Now you need to climb the mountain only
to show the world what you are made of.”
Training
I did a basic
course from the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, the best school of its kind
in Asia. This was followed by 18 months of rigorous training. I climbed
smaller, but no less dangerous mountains, had a couple of near death
experiences and underwent mind numbing, exhausting, spirit crushing pain. I
supported myself with a grant from NIM. Then Tata Steel provided me with a
generous sponsorship that let me focus exclusively on the impossible task that
lay ahead.
Death zone
My prosthetic limb
posed some unique problems. The ankle and heel would constantly swivel as I
tried to climb, causing me to lose my grip often. My right leg was held
together by a steel rod. Any pressure sent up spasms of acute intense pain. My
Sherpa almost refused to accompany me, assuring me that I was on a suicide
mission. Most regular folks don’t stand a chance against the mighty mountain.
What did I stand?
Every climber has
to traverse four camps on route to the peak. Once you’ve reached camp four,
there’s 3500 feet to the summit. This area is known as the death zone,
notorious for the number of lives it has claimed. There were bodies of
erstwhile climbers strewn all around. A Bangladeshi climber I met earlier
breathed his last right before me. Ignoring the cold fear in the pit of my
stomach, I trudged on. Our bodies behave according to how we think. I firmly
took stock of my fears and told my body that dying was not an option. But all
that changed once I reached the summit.
The top of the world
On 21st May 2013 I reached
the Everest summit. Earlier My Sherpa had informed me that my oxygen supply was
critically low. “Save your life now so that you can climb Everest again later,”
he said pragmatically. I said, “If I don’t climb Everest now, my life will not
be worth saving.” I erected the flag of my country on the peak, deposited some
pictures of my idol Swami Vivekananda next to it. Then I used the last vestiges
of my oxygen to take pictures and videos of myself on the peak. I knew I was
probably going to die. So it was important that the visual proofs of my
achievement make it down to the world. Fifty steps later, my oxygen finished.
Fortune favours the gritty
I have little
patience for wonders of faith, destiny, kismet and the like. We chart our own
destiny. It is my firmest conviction that luck will favour those who have the
drive and the tenacity to win. As I lay suffocating and gasping for breath, I
came across an extra cylinder of oxygen. My Sherpa quickly latched it on me.
Slowly we embarked on the precarious downward climb. Far more deaths occur on
the downward climb that the upward one on Everest and now that I had survived
the worst, it was time to tell my tale.
New frontiers
Arunima atop Mount Kosciuszko, Australia's highest peak
My dream is to
climb the highest peaks from each continent around the world. So far I have
accomplished four- Everest in Asia, Kilimanjaro in Africa, Elbrus in Europe and
Kosciuszko in Australia. I am headed to South America in June. The Denali Peak
in North America is going to be hard, not because the trail is the most
difficult but because it is the most expensive. I need 55 lakhs for that climb.
But my toughest test will be climbing Vinson Massif, the highest peak in
Antarctica.
Life lessons from mountaineering
Climbing mountains
has yielded the most valuable life lessons for me. It has taught me about
confidence, leadership, resilience, team building and leadership. But above all
it has taught me the power of humility. It doesn’t matter what you achieve in
life. What matters is how those achievements make you a better person. How you
treat others is at the core of what makes you a good human being.
Dream project
I run a non-profit
school for underprivileged handicapped children. The school, Shahid
Chandrashekhar Azad Khel Academy, doesn’t have much to boast except for its
grand name. We don’t have a building, a field or a court. But that doesn’t
matter. We take permissions and play in other people’s fields. My students are
my life. We train them the best we can and they have made me so proud. But we
have a long way to go. I need 25 crores to bring this project to the fruition
it deserves but don’t have 25,000 to my name. But this doesn’t deter me. I
climbed the world’s highest peak when I didn’t have a leg. What then is 25 crores?
Advice
Failure is not when
we fall short of achieving our goals. It is when we don’t have goals worthy
enough. I reiterate this small poem I wrote when the journey gets too blurry:
Rehne de aasma,
zameen ki talash kar
Rehne de aasma,
zameen ki talash kar
Sab kuch yahi hai,
kahin aur na talash kar
Jeene ke liye, ek
kami ki talash kar.
[Let the sky be and seek the earth
Let the sky be and seek the earth
All is here, search not elsewhere
To live beautifully, seek life in dearth]
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