profile
profile The great
mountaineers of the world stand on the summits of the highest places on the
planet and win laurels. Their respective countries laud and sing them, shower
them with awards, flash them around the world on television and cherish them
as national heroes. On that long upward grind
over five-six days from base camp for a typical 8000-metre peak there
struggles with the renown bound mountaineer a lonely figure shoulder to
shoulder and in step, never lagging, sometimes leading and always there to
lend a hand when needed. Unknown and unsung, this is the High Altitude Porter
(HAP) whose labour, always harder than the mountaineer’s for he ferries
heavy loads, remains forever unrequited. Hasan Jan of Hushe, forty
km north of Khaplu in Baltistan, is one such man. One of four siblings, Hasan
was born in 1974 to a father who was a small farmer. That was a time when
Hushe still worked on a no-cash economy. The farmer grew his food enough for
the family for the year and kept his herds in good fettle for dairy needs. He
and his family wore the traditional home spun wool; what little extra was
needed was procured on barter against his agricultural or dairy produce at
the village store. Hasan Jan remembers there
was never much money in the house. Consequently, even through the local
government school charged only one rupee per month, neither he nor his
siblings were enrolled. Growing up illiterate, he became his father’s farm
help at a young age. When he was eleven, he took the family’s livestock to
the summer pasture for the first time. For the next eight years that was his
life: helping his father with ploughing and planting and then spending three
months up in the high pastures. At 19, he was wedded and
soon a child was on the way. Also, the way of life was swiftly changing in
Hushe, replacing the old with a cash economy. Since money was now an
essential, Hasan betook himself to Skardu to work as a porter for outward
bound expeditions. That was the summer of 1993. It was a wait of twelve days
before he was hired by a Korean expedition attempting Gasherbrum II. At the end of his stint, he
walked away with Rs 1,800. The smell and sight of money felt good and Hasan
knew what he was going to do for the rest of his youthful life. For the next three years,
he was porter, one among the countless young men of Baltistan, carrying up to
25 kg from Askole up the Baltoro Glacier to the great glacial junction of
Concordia. After three years of portering, Hasan was hired as a member of the
kitchen staff. That beat being an ordinary porter: the load he got to carry
was less than the stipulated 25 kg and the food in the expedition kitchen was
much better than the thick dry bread Balti porters make on the way. After a couple of years of
working as kitchen staff, Hasan and three other men from Hushe hit upon a
novel idea. The closing years of the last century saw the perilous route over
the Gondogoro La connecting Baltoro Glacier with Hushe become increasingly
popular. However, the difficulties of the snow and ice conditions at over
5000 metres on the steep pass made the use of fixed ropes essential.
Borrowing the necessary pitons, ropes and other material from an experienced
Hushe porter, Hasan and his mates prepared the Gondogoro route on both sides
of the divide. Two members of this team
then went down to Concordia to broadcast the news of the route being properly
roped. Now while Hassan and his mates hoped to be paid for their work, the
advantage tow adventurers on the pass was that, preparing such a treacherous
route being time consuming, they saved precious time for a few thousand
rupees. From the summer of 1999 to
2002, the gambit worked perfectly for Hasan’s team. But, says Hasan, folks
do not like others making a good life. Every year, the number of men who
wanted to station themselves on the pass increased until there were sixteen
men sharing what the original team of four made in 1999. At the end of the
summer of 2002, as Hasan and his friend undid the rope on the pass and
divided up their profit. They decided work on Gondogoro was no longer
financially viable. They therefore reverted to portering. About this time word came
of a Spanish winter expedition to Broad Peak. One lesson that the much
experienced and by then almost world famous HAP Little Karim passed on to
Hasan was to do one’s best, never filch and never lie. At the end of the
climb, it was evident that Sebastian Alvaro, the leader, was completely taken
in by the soft-spoken and diligent Hasan Jan. The winter expedition of
2003 was followed by a double-summit bid on Gasherbrum I and II. And so,
Hasan Jan bagged his first two 8000-metre peaks. He was still basking in the
pride of this feat when the following summer he found himself with Alvaro’s
team on the Abruzzi Ridge of K-2 for the summit bid. This was the golden
jubilee of the first ascent and the mountain was crowded with climbers. Only a few hundred metres
below the summit sits the dreadful obstacle called The Bottleneck, a steep
sided pit filled with ice and powder snow with plenty of bare rock to make it
one of the more hazardous pitches on K2: it took the team over three hours to
fix rope across this treacherous 35metre gap. In this process, one of Hasan
Jan’s crampons came loose. Undoing his heavy outer gloves, the man retied
the crampon. But at nearly 8800 metres, the keen wind dropped chill factor to
minus 40 degrees Celsius and in those couple of minutes Hasan felt that
burning sensation that marks the onset of frostbite. Across the Bottleneck, as
he wielded his ice axe, Hasan felt a peculiar stiffness in his hand. Removing
his gloves, he saw the first three fingers of his hand beginning to blacken.
He had been frost-bitten; the effected flesh was beginning to die. Despite
the encouragement of his team leader and the nearness to the summit, Hasan
decided to descend. The mountain is not running away, he thought to himself,
but any more exposure to the freezing temperature and high winds could only
aggravate his condition. He aborted when he was just a hundred metres short
of the summit. Walking back to Hushe via
Gondogoro, Hasan Jan eventually reached medical help and lost some flesh from
the tips of three fingers on his right hand. That was how I first knew
him in 2006. In 2005 and 2007, Hasan Jan
climbed with Alvaro’s teams to summit Nanga Parbat and Broad Peak
respectively with the intervening year going without an eight-thousander bid. In 2009, the Korean team he
was climbing with summited Nanga Parbat at four in the afternoon. As it goes,
this was way too late in the day to be on a peak notorious as a life-taker.
Leaving the climbers behind, Hasan hurried back. But this was not him. He
felt he had done wrong. And so, a couple of hundred metres below the summit
he sat down in the lee of a rock to await the others. Sleep overcame him. He
was roused by the burning sensation he now knew so well. Falling asleep with his
hands tucked in his armpits, he had somehow managed to pull the right hand
out, somehow yanking off the glove. The inevitable had happened and even as
he waited for the Koreans to catch up, he knew he had frostbite. This time
surgery took off the top segment of the fingers that had suffered earlier. That is how I saw him in
June 2012. Hasan Jan says Sebastian
Alvaro is a generous tipper: a bonus of €300 for the HAP summiting with the
team is indeed a liberal addition to the porter’s wages. But the men who
risk their lives to get the climbers within striking distance of their
summits, lose out to the tour operators who indenture them out to climbing
parties. Half of what the expeditioners pay for the porters ends up in the
operator’s pocket. And so while the middleman grows richer and fatter, men
like Hasan Jan continue to live on a pittance. But it was from this small
amount that Hasan judiciously saved some little money every year to be able
to raise a four-room hotel in Hushe village. A budget establishment, his
hotel is in the first year of operation and already doing reasonably. With
the ever-increasing traffic over Gondogoro La, Hasan looks forward to his
business growing. At thirty-eight, he knows
his days as HAP are already behind him. But his meeting those many years ago
with Alvaro proved lucky for Hasan continues to work with him. He is aware
that Alvaro values him as a totally reliable and dedicated worker. Climbers
from far off countries have acknowledged his hard work — the Koreans
contributed US$1,000 to his frostbite operation in 2009 (the total cost was
Rs 337,000 all inclusive) — but Hasan does not exist for the government of
Pakistan. In this invisibility, he is
not alone. There are thousands like him sprinkled in the great mountain
country from Chitral through Gojal and Shimshal to Baltistan. These are men
who again and again, year after year, bring glory to Pakistan by assisting
climbing expeditions in their endeavours. While the climbers return home to
laurels and recognition in their countries, the Hasan Jans of Pakistan live
on in poverty and obscurity. They are never lauded as heroes for we as a
nation of exhibitionists only worship uneducated louts who gamble away the
country’s name on cricket grounds. The greatest scam the HAP
faces is the so-called insurance he gets before going on an expedition. A
requirement by law for the hiring company, it is in reality only an eyewash.
On both occasions that he was frostbitten and needed medical attention, the
insurance company told Hasan that frost bite was not covered by the policy.
Hasan says that he knows of cases where the next of kin of porters who had
died in high altitude mishaps were told that death by accident was also not
covered! When he tried to make good
his medical bill in 2009 and was turned down, in a fit of anger he tore up
the insurance policy right there in the office of the insuring company. Hasan
has since never bothered with the formality. “Why waste the hiring
company’s money?” he asked ruefully. Hasan Jan has learned the
lessons of life well, however. Save his eldest daughter who missed school
owing to poverty, his children are being educated. He says he does not wish a
porter’s life for them. In fact, he does not even want them to walk the
livestock to the summer pasture. Only one who has humped a
heavy backpack in high places appreciates the hard work of a professional
porter. For everyone else men like Hasan Jan are only common labourers. They
are not recognised as the heroes they are in reality; they do not even
receive the wages they deserve, leave alone recognition. Even as you read these
lines, porters (at least in Baltistan) are talking of forming a union to
press for more equitable conditions. But its realisation may be years in the
coming.
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