Review of 'BURIED IN THE SKY'




In a dark moonless midnight, two exhausted men, harnessed to each other, grappled below an icy peak, with just an ice axe holding them from a fall to death in an icy abyss below. Their mind dazed and hallucinating due to lack of oxygen and the air freezing their tongue when they opened their mouth to gasp for breath. Boulders of ice broke off above and hurtled past them as they shuffled and dodged weakly. They knew it was a matter of time before a ice boulder would knock them down. They had given up hope long back. They prayed silently with bowed heads to the mountain goddess. She answered soon. An ice boulder or rock knocked on the head of the lower man and batted him off the snow. The weight of his body on the harness peeled the man above from the slope. Both men hurtled down towards the black darkness of the icy abyss below. They wondered on what they had done to get the mountain goddess so angry. They wondered on how they could have got themselves into this moment as their lives flashed past in their mind.

Above them, several other alpinist, lost equally in the icy darkness and in their own hallucinations, were grappling in the icy slopes. They were all wondering how they, the best of the alpinist from around the world, could have got themselves into this hopeless situation of wandering and falling to death or just sitting down in the icy dark and most likely freeze to death. 

This was the midnight of 1st August 2008, just below the peak of K2, the most treacherous peak in the Himalayas, and it played out the deadliest of catastrophes in the history of K2's climbing history. 11 climbers died in a matter of 27 hours. Two survived. They were sherpas. 

Buried in the Sky' is not just an excellent and a deep reportage of the deadliest of Himalayan disasters but also a full-of-heart life story of the two sherpas who survived. While writing on this, Peter Zuckerman and Amanda Padoan have written an eloquent and moving account of the Sherpa community, whose life and history are entwined with the history of Himalayan climbing. It is both a panoramic and a poignant account of the Sherpa community and their contribution to Himalayan climbing. It is a story of how this ethnic group has been burdened, liberated and defined by this egoistic and adventurous quest of other people from other parts of the world. 'Buried in the Sky' is about mountains and about Sherpas as has never been brought together before, leaving one dazed and moved. 

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