For a few oxygen-deprived minutes, Sudarshan Gautam stood higher in the sky than anyone on Earth.

The Nepalese-born Canadian, straddling two countries atop an icy summit, looked down through gauzy mist and a bleary mind on what he could see of his achievement: Everest.

It jutted through the troposphere like a titan’s tooth. Hours later it would chew up one of his teammates and leave him dead on the mountainside. Gautam himself barely got out alive, succumbing to exhaustion and prompting a dangerous rescue mission — the highest-altitude helicopter evacuation ever.

But for a fleeting moment, on the roof of the world, he knew only that he’d tested the limits of topography and willpower, and he’d come out on top.

What’s more, he’d done it all without arms.

Three years later, Gautam, 37, sits in his Brampton apartment pouring two cups of sweet Nepalese milk tea — the pot deftly secured with his right foot using his big toe and second toe — and explains how he got to this point.

Born to a woodcutter and a housewife in 1978, he grew up amid the slopes of Ramechhap district in a village east of Kathmandu. As a child he loved soccer and science projects, and dreamed of becoming a pilot or politician.

At age 15, those hopes were violently sidelined in a tragic accident. He was flying a kite that got caught in some uninsulated wires. When he reached to free it, 11,000 volts coursed through his body.

“My arms were completely burned,” he says. They had to be amputated. Cloistered in a hospital for eight months and deserted by his friends, Gautam fell into depression.

“I knew I was alive. Yet I was no more alive than a dead body.”

Over the next few years, Gautam worked up the will to re-enter the world, teaching himself to eat, cook, dress, write, type, shave and even drive stick using only his feet.

“Sewing might be the hardest one,” he says.

He enrolled at the Nepal Commerce Campus college, becoming student council president and advocating for the rights of disabled students. He founded a disabilities centre in his district. In his off-hours he scaled Nepalese heights like Mount Yala and Mount Ramdung, seeking to challenge himself and inspire strength in fellow amputees.

“I transformed from being a poor, pitiable child to somebody who could help others.”

Gautam became more outspoken on state corruption and landed on government radar at the height of Nepal’s civil war, when subversive commentary wasn’t taken lightly by the monarchy. He claims he was kidnapped twice by local authorities for his criticism.

“Our country is very beautiful, but the leaders are very corrupt … and not very responsible to the public,” he says.

In 2006, Gautam and his wife fled to Calgary, with the nearby Rockies “resembling a home away from home.” He was seeking “a better life and a safe future,” one that could accommodate his disability and the right to dissent.

Since then, Gautam has worked as a social activist, raised a young family and obtained Canadian citizenship. He moves easily between the local awards galas of urban Canada — he’s been lauded at a few — and the unpaved roads of rural Nepal, to which he’s returned repeatedly for community projects and film shoots.

Making his onscreen debut last year, Gautam played an armless, jungle-roving militia leader in the action flick Himmatwali, which translates to “Courageous.” He says he’s appearing in two more movies this year, one shot in Toronto and another called Vijeta — The Winner — in a Bollywood studio that will tell an enhanced version of his life story.

Gautam denies rumours, circulating in Nepal for years — and ginned up, he says, for box office sales — of a previous affair with Rheka Thapa, the director and star of his debut film.

Now based in Brampton, he admits his ocean-hopping schedule has taken a toll. Gautam recently separated from his second wife, who lives in Calgary with their 9-year-old daughter. He rarely sees his 13-year-old son from a previous marriage in Nepal.

“If you want to achieve things, sometimes you have to lose also,” he says. “My family is the dark part of my life. One man cannot get everything.”

Relationships are a casualty of ambition, he continues. “To get success, there is nothing, just you in the world. You have to just see the mission. It doesn’t matter who is with me or not with me.”

In 2013, Gautam found himself again drawn back to his homeland. The prospect of Everest loomed in his mind like a rocky hurdle, one he felt compelled to leap “to spread the message that disabled people can do extraordinary things.”

He sold his property in Nepal to muster more than $100,000 for the journey. His father also scraped together cash to sponsor him.

Gautam banked his own sense of self-worth on the expedition, despite the warnings. “We don’t want to lose you, Gautam,” he recalls friends saying. “You cannot go, it’s madness.”

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‘Most of the climbers had already turned back …’

Gautam arrived near Everest’s South Base Camp, 5,400 metres above sea level, in spring 2013. He spent two months day-hiking the snow-scoured plateaus nearby, acclimatizing himself to the low-pressure air. He used a modified harness looped around his chest, tied to his jacket sleeve and secured to a Sherpa to catch him in case of a fall.

Early on May 20, a day after setting out from Camp 3 on Everest’s south side, his team of 10 climbed into the notorious “death zone,” a treacherous series of icy slopes more than 8,000 metres up. In that moonscape the air is so thin that even supplemental oxygen fails to nourish brain and body for long.

Hours from the summit, facing a snaky, serrated ridge swathed in cloud, Gautam disregarded his team’s repeated suggestions to turn around. “Most of the climbers had already turned back because of fatigue, oxygen problems, lack of energy,” he says. “I thought, no, do or die, there is no option.”

On gnarled crampons, stumbling through snow and dimming senses, he reached the peak at 10:50 a.m.

“I cried,” he says. “Everybody cried. That was my big challenge for the world. That’s the biggest challenge for my life.”

Gautam was the first and so far only person without arms to climb the world’s tallest mountain without the use of prosthetics.

“He took the challenge — that’s the kind of person he is,” says Dibya Pradham, former president of the Calgary Nepalese Community Association. “You can’t believe someone without arms can climb Mount Everest. It just seems impossible.”

Victory over the mountain wasn’t total, however. Hours after summiting, one man on the crew, a Bangladeshi film director on his second climb up Everest, lost consciousness because of a lack of oxygen. “My team saw him slide down, and he died,” Gautam says.

He recalls having difficulty thinking and losing energy on his descent through the death zone. He collapsed. He has little memory of the helicopter that hovered into view hours later, making a record-breaking rescue at 7,800 metres.

“The hardest thing is to go up,” Gautam says, “but it’s a thousand times harder to go down.”

TheHimalayas stand 12,000 kilometres away from the rectangular midrise Gautam now calls home. Between emails tapped out with his toes, Gautam talks about his role as cultural ambassador, working with the Non-Resident Nepali Association Canada and a local Lions Club to strengthen ties with his homeland and raise money for people struggling in the wake of last year’s magnitude 7.8 earthquake that devastated parts of Nepal, where reconstruction has lagged.

“The real time to support is now,” he says. “People, especially handicapped people — some who lost their house, lost their parents, lost their family — they have almost nothing.”

A friend, Puskar Bhatta, calls Gautam the “most generous” person he knows. “I help him sometimes, but he helps so many others across the world,” says Bhatta, a Nepalese expat who lives in the GTA.

Duane Geddes, executive director of the Sam Sullivan Disability Foundation in B.C., worked with Gautam to help raise awareness for his climb.

“He’s never been afraid to talk about his own situation and how he’s been able to overcome his disabilities,” Geddes says.

On Gautam’s return from Everest, the non-profit lauded him at an event atop Vancouver’s Grouse Mountain.

“That climb in Nepal, that was just an incredible reflection of his tenacity. He’s an amazing individual to have done what he’s done,” says Geddes.

Gautam, who supports himself with some money from his movies and the Ontario Disability Support Program, intends to raise funds for disabled and orphaned children in rural communities through his own non-profit, the Leg Is My Arm foundation, as well as Nepalese and Canadian NGOs. He wants to launch a Nepalese branch of the B.C. Mobility Opportunities Society, a non-profit that helps people with disabilities explore the outdoors.

He also plans to climb North America’s tallest peak, Denali in Alaska, to raise awareness this year, and then, in 2017, to conquer Everest all over again.

“It’s what I have to do,” he says. “Compared with what I have had to face and to learn in my life, and compared with what I hope to do, Everest is easy.”

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