‘Don’t send your girl to Everest,’ Puja’s neighbours warned her parents. But neither patriarchy nor frostbite could stop the 18-year-old

Consider this. Every day an 18-year-old girl in a remote Uttarakhand village milks cows and collects fuel wood, fodder and water for the family; she works in farms owned by the rich, sowing seeds and harvesting crops. She cooks for her family, washes dishes and, finally, before she goes to bed, the Class XII student finishes her homework. Then, one day, she decides she wants to scale the world’s highest peak.

Puja Mehra’s journey was somewhat along these lines. When I ask for her in Bageshwar, everyone knows who she is. “You mean the one who climbed Mt. Everest in Nepal,” asks a resident when I look for Puja’s house. The children of Telihaat, Puja’s village, can tell you the height of Mt. Everest.

I meet Puja on a warm April afternoon in her newly-built home in Telihaat village in Bageshwar district. The four-room house still smells of varnish. “We borrowed money from our uncles to build this house. Most of that ₹4 lakh loan is still pending,” says Puja, her big eyes doing most of the talking. Her family used to live earlier in a one-room house near their wheat fields. “It was an old house and whenever it rained, water poured through the slate roof. We would pick up our blankets and mattresses and move to a corner of the room.”

In one room of her house hangs a calendar of the National Cadet Corps (NCC) featuring a photo of an all-girls team summiting Sagarmatha or Mt. Everest. Mehra is somewhere there in the photo. The calendar is a symbol of Mehra’s journey, the fulfilment of her dream.

“I had never heard of Mt. Everest. I came to know about it in 2015 from my seniors during our first mountaineering course at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute (HMI), Darjeeling.” Mehra was part of the first-ever NCC Girls Expedition to the peak. She represented Uttarakhand in the national team of 10 girl cadets who summited the peak last May.

Puja Mehra (second from right) and her team on the summit.

Mehra never received any formal physical training before she joined NCC in 2013. But she has always been interested in sports and played kabbadi at the national level when in school. “Puja would do whatever the boys do: play football and cricket. But she also helped me in household tasks,” her mother Geeta Mehra recalls.

That was Puja’s endurance training. Helping her mother with daily chores. “I am the only girl in the family. If I didn’t share the workload, it would have been hard for my mother to run the family.”

Mehra’s father, Chandan Singh Mehra, is a farmer who doubles up as a bus driver. The family owns a few acres of land; the produce is barely sufficient to make ends meet. Monkeys and wild boar consume most of it. Puja and her mother work on other farms to supplement their income. All told, the family makes a little less than ₹9,000 a month. “Whenever my father comes home, he buys vegetables and grains that last a few days,” says Mehra, a faint smile on her face.

It was then I realised that scaling Mt. Everest was an easier task than changing the long-established beliefs of society. Mindsets haven’t changed.

Her teachers at the government college of Garur encouraged Mehra to join NCC because she was good at sport and ran faster than boys her age. But no one thought she would scale Mt. Everest in her first attempt.

Mountains of prejudice

Two years ago, Puja climbed Mt. Deo-Tibba (19,688 ft) near Manali in Himachal Pradesh. She also summited Mt. Trishul (23,360 ft) in Uttarakhand as part of a pre-Everest expedition.

“After the Mt. Trishul expedition, I was lazing around at home when I received a letter from NCC saying I was selected for the Mt. Everest expedition. It was then I realised that scaling Mt. Everest was an easier task than changing the long-established beliefs of society. Mindsets haven’t changed. My neighbours warned my parents against sending me on the expedition. ‘Don’t send your girl to Everest. It’s a place from where no one returns,’ they would tell my parents.” But Puja stood her ground; her teachers met her parents and convinced them, and finally her family relented.

Puja Mehra at home in Telihaat. | Photo Credit: Arpita Chakrabarty

Puja had no special diet, she ate whatever the family could afford—roti, dal, sabzi. She drank a glass of milk every day. She did no weightlifting or strenuous training, but ran 10 km a day, followed by freehand exercises.

29,029 ft above sea level

Puja went for an intensive month-long winter training camp at Siachen Glacier along with nine other cadets six months before the expedition. In March 2016, the team headed to Nepal and reached base camp on April 21. After being acclimatised at 23,000 ft and 26,000 ft for several days, and after getting frostbite on the way up, Puja reached the peak on May 21 at about 11 in the morning.

“The first thought that ran across my mind the moment I reached the top of the world was, yes, I have finally scaled the world’s highest peak, but now how will I get back home? It seemed a long, long journey from Everest to Telihaat.” Puja reached home in early June, to awards and felicitations.

She now wants to join college, work, climb again. She doesn’t want marriage like her village friends. Her father is willing to support her, but Chandan Singh also knows that when you live in a closed society like Telihaat—where the village is an extended family and where women from childhood carry the burden of home, cattle and farms on their shoulders—such wishful thinking may not become reality.

Puja is not discouraged by any of this. “Our reality depends on how badly we want something,” she says confidently. I’m reminded of something Edmund Hillary said, “It’s not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”

A journalist based in Uttarakhand, the writer explores the lives of those who walk mountains.