Hardy account of a mountaineer
In 1965 the same young Sikh went on to climb Mt Everest along with Sherpa Phu Dorji and Harish Rawat after two earlier pairs had already made it to the summit. The first two Indian expeditions had failed to put a man on the peak, the second coming tantalisingly close to the peak at 28,600 ft. Ahluwalia's own ascent nearly never took place because an avalanche buried the available oxygen cylinders for the third attempt. It was only lucky digging that helped them locate the cylinders.
But soon after the climb and after receiving all the hossanas, the 1965 Indo-Pak war broke out and in the words of the writer, "the sten gun replaced the ice-axe and the grenade the piton". Ahluwalia himself was struck by tragedy when an infiltrator's bullet in Srinagar's Gulmarg area struck his neck and paralysed him waist down—this 15 days after ceasefire was declared.
The book after this is about him coming to terms with life on a wheelchair. His treatment in Bombay, with interesting asides like trying a hakim's remedy of ghee, pills and pigeon soup, and subsequently going to Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, England. For a while his turbaned appearance started wild rumours at the hospital about his being an Arab with four wives. But his stay of five months at Stoke restored his sapping self-confidence and this conquering of the internal summit, Ahluwalia pegs at a scale higher than climbing the Everest