Part VI: Graduation.
This is a series of journal entries from my recent trip to the mountains...which I fell in love with originally when I first visited K2. Read about that here.
Part 1-5 here. This is the conclusion.
After the fall heavy day yesterday, I had trouble sleeping. I was so exhausted that I got into bed at 8 pm. But despite doing that, I would wake up every hour with a gasp and a jolt because all my dreams were about having a fumble on a cliff and then falling in a deep ravine.
So it was no surprise that I woke up groggy and grumpy. I was annoyed at myself. Today was rock climbing day, and I’d spent most of the last night in a state of terror.
The day was off to a bad start. I tried correcting it with the usual recipe: a cup of coffee and 3 sets of jumping jacks and push ups.
That helped somewhat. But then we discovered that the rock climbing shoes Ali Jaan had brought for me were small. I had to wear my trekking shoes, and as we trudged through the snow, my feet got soaked.
So here I was, underslept, grumpy, and with wet feet on a -15 day.
Ali Jaan walked me towards the edge of a cliff. I looked down and got dizzy. It was a multi-storey fall. On rock.
Since as long as I can remember, I’ve got a phobia of heights. It terrifies me. I don’t know where or why I got it, just that I remember having it as a child. (Perhaps it was Mom telling us the horror story of her half brother dying after falling off the roof of their house in Narowal…while we were still kids).
The wind picked up. My hands and legs began to shake and my throat became dry.
And then suddenly….I got tired. Of just worrying incessantly and accumulating hiccup after hiccup since I woke up.
I asked Ali Jaan for five minutes, went off to the side and began a breathing exercise. Somewhere in the middle of the breathing exercise, the sun came out. I felt it on my face and suddenly felt a whole lot better.
Today the worst that could happen was that I could fall of the cliff. I thought if I was intended to die here, nothing could alter that. And so on I went to the edge of the cliff. The first 2 minutes were terrifying as I lowered myself without a safety carabiner.
The task: rappel down the entire cliff, using your hand to brake as you went down.
After the safety was in, I just felt so……free.
Ali Jaan was not even done with instructions, and I was ready to go.
I let go of the rope. Then braked gently. Hit the cliff with my feet. Bounced. Pushed back again, braked, hit the cliff with my feet. Bounced again.
Ali Jaan and Zahid’s voices grew distant. The sun felt great on my neck. Even Diran looked less menacing. Big Country played in my brain.
I was flowing.
It felt so great that I landed at the base of the cliff, and then ran up again with feet that were frozen and numb by now. Five minutes later I was at the cliff’s edge again.
The non-safety bit at the top of the cliff felt even less terrifying.
Lower. Bounce off the cliff. Brake. Lower again. Bounce again.
Pause to take in the view.
Then bounce again.
The same cliff that had been terrifying now seemed too small - the rappel ended so soon!
We got back to the camp and out of the blue, my graduation ceremony was announced. I was surprised! Ali Jaan said I was ready.
The cook and camp staff came out. The custom is that you do a little dance. So we put on an obscure Balti song and then went around dancing in a circle.
Zahid got a pen and my CNIC, and soon enough there was a certificate with my name on it. I had completed level 1 and 2!
I asked Ali Jaan what happened next. He thought for a while and then told me I was his second best student.
“What was the best student like?”, I asked.
“He would fall even more than you do. But then he would not go back to camp until he had figured it out. He repeated every lesson twice, so much so that he deliberately slowed down the course and did every module in double the time. Others would look at him and talk about his incompetence. But he had the highest bar for himself. And he would also be more forgiving of himself when it didn’t work. That made him a fantastic climber.”
“You’ve got to be okay looking like a fool. That’s Junoon”, he continued, as he handed me a tiny piece of rope
“When I got started, I would carry this rope everywhere with me. I would be tying mountaineering knots all the time. My family thought I’d gone crazy”
“My best students are okay looking like fools.”
I let this linger between us for five minutes. Ali Jaan stayed with the silence, and then said:
“But my best student never came back. I never saw him again. Most of them don’t come back to climb. They do it once, and they’re gone. The difference between the best and the rest is keeping at it”
“How many years?”, I asked.
“At least a decade”, he said.
The clouds grumbled over Diran in the background. I let this sink in too.
I have come to love Ali Jaan, and I’m going to miss his company. The majority of our time together was spent in silence. He’s one of the rare subset of people who say more with silence than they do with words.
After what seems like years, I found a teacher that made me marvel at what an art it is to be a good teacher.
No wonder the Italians call him ‘Professor Aaaleee’
It is close to sunset now as we drive out of Hopar. My heart sinks as Hopar Glacier first goes out of view, and then soon Diran disappears as well.
I feel the same tug I felt when after seven long, hard days of walking towards K2, we turned back towards home for the first time.
I don’t know if I will be a good mountaineer.
But I do know that I have a profound love for these giants. For their utility in making me examine the unexamined parts of my personhood; more specifically, my relationship with fear.
And this will keep pulling me towards them again and again.
Postscript: My fat, fluffy, and unlikely mountain friend.
