Chapter 2: Base Camp

They gathered at Lukla in early March, when the pre-monsoon window was just beginning to open. Priya arrived first, stepping off the twin-engine plane with the measured composure of someone accustomed to crisis. She worked as an emergency room surgeon in Chicago and carried herself with the detached efficiency of a person who had learned to separate feeling from function. Aarav came next, quieter than Rohan remembered, his lanky frame layered in expensive technical gear. He had made a small fortune in software and spent his weekends rock climbing in Joshua Tree. He greeted Rohan with a handshake that lasted a beat too long, as though testing whether the connection still held. Dawa met them at the teahouse with maps and weather reports spread across a wooden table. He was in his mid-fifties, compact and weathered, with a calmness that seemed geological in its permanence. He explained the route in precise detail. The northwest ridge had been attempted twice before, both times unsuccessfully. The first team turned back at twenty thousand feet due to avalanche risk. The second lost a climber in a crevasse field and abandoned the expedition. Vikram believed he had found a safer line through the ice, a traverse that skirted the avalanche zone and connected to a rock band leading directly to the summit ridge. Dawa had climbed with Vikram on seven expeditions and trusted his route-finding instincts. But he was honest about the dangers. The traverse was exposed. The rock band was technical. And above twenty thousand feet, the weather could change from clear skies to whiteout in less than an hour. The three siblings sat around the table, studying the map without speaking. Each of them was thinking the same unspoken thing. Their father had asked them to finish what he could not, but he had never bothered to finish being their father. The mountain, at least, was something they could conquer and leave behind.