The beige building Aarohan has on its façade a mural depicting a mountaineer climbing a steep ridge. It is the office of the Mountaineering Association of Krishnanagar or MAK.
MAK was in the news recently after its members Subrata Ghosh, 45, and Rumpa Das, 44, scaled Mt Everest. But that day the three-storey building on Krishnanagar’s Church Road, 100 kilometres north of Calcutta, wore a sombre look. Rumpa has made it back, but not Subrata. His body could not be retrieved either.
MAK was founded in 1986 by Ashok Roy, an employee of the Bureau of Applied Economics & Statistics of the West Bengal government. It has so far conducted 40 expeditions to the Himalayas.
That day there are only 20 members — out of a total of 87 — at the gathering. Ashim Kumar Mondal, 52, who is the club secretary, says, “You must have seen the sign at the entrance.” I had seen a flex with a photograph of Subrata and a tribute in Bengali. Mondal adds, “Just 10 days ago, we were gearing up to celebrate, but see what’s happened…” He sighs and goes quiet.
When Subrata and Rumpa embarked on this expedition on March 31, so did Mondal. He led the team of seven, including climbers from the US, Croatia, Serbia and the Philippines. Four of them made it to the summit and two of them lost their lives.
Mondal, who quit mid way and stayed at Camp 4, says he took the decision because his sherpa fell ill. He adds, “I have a family and my daughter is just six years old. I couldn’t risk my life.”
Camp 4 which is the final base camp, and the Everest ahead. This picture was taken on May 14, 2025. The group scaled the peak on May 15
The first victim was the Filipino Philipp J. Santiago or PJ, who succumbed to altitude sickness before he could reach Camp 4.
Subrata made it to the top but suffered a fall while climbing down. For now, his body lies just below Hillary Step, which is a vertical rock face on the southeast ridge, 60 metres from the summit. One of the most technically difficult parts of the climb, this rock face is also known as the “death zone”. It has claimed several climbers at the time of ascent itself.
When a climber falls, the sherpa who is in the employ of a climbing agency alerts it using a satellite phone. If there is an emergency, the agency contacts the Nepal government.
Subrata’s sherpa Palchen Tamang had to leave him there. Says Mondal, “His cousin Sumitra was waiting to organise a retrieval mission.” But the climbing window, which is the time span when the Nepalese authorities let climbers access the peak, closed on May 29.
Meeting Everest Madam
A rain-drenched morning in Ranaghat, a railhead 85 kilometres north of Calcutta. At the rickshaw stand, no sooner than I utter the name Rumpa Das that a rickshaw puller excitedly comes forward to ferry me to “Everest Madam’s” house.
Rumpa Das at her Ranaghat residence.
He is elderly and talkative. He is full of information about Rumpa. How she has been scaling the mountains year after year, how he often ferries her to her workplace. He says, “She is a teacher at Cooper’s Colony High School. Teaches English. Her husband used to climb the mountains too. He quit after an injury. I am told she mortgaged her house to fund her Everest expedition.” His sentences come in short bursts in between all that pedalling.
When I reach the two-storey house with a garden in front, Rumpa is at the gate to greet me. She is the fifth Bengali woman to have scaled Mt Everest. I notice the dark patches on her face, very common in mountaineers and caused by exposure to the sun’s intense ultraviolet radiation at great heights.
In one corner of the drawing room, there are two cupboards full of medals, trophies, certificates and laminated newspaper cuttings — all to do with her achievements. There are about a dozen bouquets of fresh flowers too.
I point to one of the many framed photographs and she provides the context. “That’s on Mt Ramjak (6,318m) in Lahaul and Spiti, Himachal. I was the first Indian woman to summit last year.”
Rumpa was one of the three teachers from Nadia and North 24-Parganas who participated in the Mt Ramjak expedition led by Basanta Singha Roy in 2024. Singha Roy’s other triumphs include Mt Everest, Mt Annapurna and Mt Kanchenjunga. The other two were Prashant Singha, a geography teacher from the Bamun Pukur High School in Nadia, and Subrata, who was then a teacher at the Kapashati Milon Bithi High School in Bagda in North 24-Parganas. The flags of all three schools of Bengal were hoisted on the Ramjak when they scaled it on June 30, 2024. This year’s expedition was Rumpa’s 13th.
Subrata Ghosh gearing up for the summit push on May 15.
Three years ago, she was forced to quit an attempt to summit Everest after she contracted Covid-19. She says, “But this time I was confident. I knew Devi Sagarmatha would listen to my prayers.”
But Rumpa is not celebrating; her sensitive face bears a vacant expression. She talks about her climbing partner Subrata, who was also a resident of Ranaghat. “The tragedy is that he succumbed to the elements while descending,” she says.
No photographs, please
Singha Roy, 65, has witnessed enough tragedy and triumph in his 38-year-old mountaineering career. He has led most of the mountaineering expeditions of MAK since 1996.
He too cannot stop talking about Subrata. He wonders aloud if Subrata’s sherpa didn’t advise him properly, or if Subrata ignored Palchen’s suggestions.
Rumpa followed her sherpa’s advice and reached the peak quickly, and descended before the weather turned treacherous. “Her sherpa Birey didn’t even let her take any photographs. You need to peel away layers of gloves to take one photograph. That can set you back by five minutes or more,” says Singha Roy.
A four-to-five hour delay at the start is dangerous as the air is thin; if the oxygen level dwindles, fatigue keeps mounting and you’re unable to move.
This is what happened to Singha Roy during the Mt Dhaulagiri expedition in 2013. He says,
“My oxygen supply was exhausted. I was lying in the snow at a height of 7,880 metres for 16 hours, unattended.” Singha Roy was eventually rescued and admitted to a hospital in Kathmandu.
Later, both his big toes had to be amputated; they had been damaged by frostbite.
In the same expedition, his climbing partner Debashis Biswas was taken for dead. “My wife had arrived at Kathmandu to receive my corpse,” Biswas tells The Telegraph.
In the summer of 2016, 11 people from Bengal had set off for Mt Everest. Only eight succeeded. Subhas Paul, Paresh Chandra Nath and Gautam Ghosh died.
Some of the veterans believe that these three had embarked on the expedition with little preparation. Rather than focus on rigorous physical fitness and proper planning, they had to spend their energy scraping funds till the last minute.
Recalls Malay Mukherjee, who summited Mt Everest that same day, “I found them climbing up while I was descending. They started quite late; the delay must have turned fatal.”
While the body of Subhas, a truck driver from Bankura, was retrieved, Gautam and Paresh remained lost in the snow for more than a year. It took eight sherpas and an arduous expedition sponsored by the government of West Bengal — and an expense of ₹2.5 crore — to retrieve them.
In the following years, many more mountaineers from Bengal — Rajib Bhattacharya, Dipankar Ghosh, Chhanda Gayen, Kuntal Kanrar, Biplab Baidya — lost their lives in various expeditions.
Biswas has written a Bengali book titled Parbat Abhijaan: Ghotona o Durghotona on the dangers lurking behind the snowy peaks. The book was published recently. He writes, “Nowadays, when I pose for a group photograph at the base camp, I look at all the faces carefully. There’s an eerie feeling that some of the faces are likely to be missing in the photograph that will be taken once the expedition is over.”
Death zone
Ashok Roy, who is the founding secretary of MAK, remembers an incident from 2010. It was another Everest expedition.
Some of the climbers were waiting at the base camp when they spotted helicopters overhead. Says Roy, “We were told they were bringing down corpses of climbers. As each body was being retrieved, we rushed to the spot to check whether any of our members had died.” But the unfortunate dead belonged to a Russian group.
Rumpa recalls how she’s been witness to four deaths in the recent expedition. “PJ’s death came as a shock, and it took me some time to recover,” she says.
Mondal says he came across the lifeless form of PJ at the time of descent. He says, “I couldn’t believe my eyes. For 40 days, we’d been quite close, despite the language barrier. We chatted, laughed, cooked, ate together and even had heated arguments on occasion.”
As she made her way through the death zone, Rumpa came across two other dead climbers. She says, “I had to look away and focus on my ascent. I wanted to reach the top anyhow and come back in time before my oxygen supply dwindled.”
Biswas has also come across a number of corpses of climbers during his expeditions. Many bodies remain up there. Some are hidden by the snow or swallowed by the deep crevasses.
Some have even become milestones en route the summit. They have names like Green Boots and Sleeping Beauty.
Says Biswas, “My mate Pemba Chhuti Sherpa, who fell down while climbing down the Saser Kangri IV (7,416m), remains hidden in a deep crevasse in the Karakoram range.” Roy told me how the body of the British mountaineer George Mallory lay hidden from 1924 to 1999. His climbing partner A.C. Irvine’s corpse is yet to be located.
There have been more than 300 deaths in the Everest region in the last century. The death toll has kept going up. Three people have died so far this year while attempting the Everest summit, overall 14 in the Himalayas, and eight in 2024, according to Nepal’s tourism department. Nothing ventured, nothing lost.
Last year, the Nepalese authorities set a goal to retrieve five bodies from the death zone and they succeeded.
“It is extremely difficult,” says Biswas, who led a body retrieval expedition. “Getting the corpse out is one part of it, bringing it down is another challenge.”
Biswas believes Subrata, a seasoned climber, should have paid heed to early warning signs. It seems he was exhausted and showed signs of altitude sickness. Says Biswas, “One should not ignore the alarm bells in the body. Actually, most climbers from Bengal have to go to lengths to organise funds and that done they want to summit at any cost, even ignoring the danger signs.”
Singha Roy applauds Mondal’s decision to quit at the right time.
Unmoved by triumphs and tragedies, Singha Roy himself has not been able to ignore the call of the mountains.
The MAK office in Krishnanagar in mourning for Subrata.
Come June 25, he will set off for Gya (6,794m), one of the most challenging peaks located at the junction of Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh and Tibet, with 11 mountaineers of MAK.