Born Again on the Mountain

Arunima Sinha grew up in Ambedkar Nagar, in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. She loved sport and was a national-level volleyball player. In April 2011, when she was in her early twenties, she boarded a night train from Lucknow towards Delhi.

She was travelling to sit an exam for a job with a paramilitary force.

The train

During the journey, a group of men tried to snatch her bag and the gold chain around her neck. She fought back.

In the struggle, she was pushed out of the moving train.

She landed on the tracks just as a train was passing on the next line. Her left leg was crushed. She lay injured beside the railway through the night, unable to move, while trains went past.

In the morning, villagers found her and took her to hospital. To save her life, doctors had to amputate her left leg below the knee. She also had injuries to her spine and her other leg.

In hospital

The incident was widely reported in India. While she was recovering, some news reports questioned her account of what had happened. It was a painful time. She was young, badly injured, and her story was being doubted in public.

Lying in her hospital bed, Arunima made a decision. In her memoir, she describes deciding that she would not be remembered only as a victim. She wanted to do something extraordinary.

She decided she would climb Mount Everest.

At the time, no woman who had lost a leg had ever reached the summit.

Training

She was fitted with a prosthetic leg, and as soon as she was discharged from hospital, she went to seek out Bachendri Pal, who in 1984 had become the first Indian woman to climb Everest.

Bachendri Pal agreed to mentor her. Arunima trained in the mountains of Uttarakhand and, later, on other high peaks. She learned to climb with her prosthetic leg on ice, rock and snow. It was slow and painful. Her stump bled. She often fell behind the other climbers. But she kept going.

Everest

In the spring of 2013, Arunima set out with a Sherpa guide to climb Everest from the Nepal side.

The climb took weeks, moving up and down between camps to get used to the thin air. Near the top, at more than eight thousand metres, there is so little oxygen that climbers can lose their judgement, their strength and their lives. In her memoir she describes passing the bodies of climbers who had died on the mountain, and the fear that she would join them.

According to her account, on the final push her supply of bottled oxygen was running low, and her guide urged her to turn back. She refused.

On the morning of 21 May 2013, Arunima Sinha reached the summit of Mount Everest, 8,849 metres high. She became the first woman amputee to climb the world's highest mountain.

The descent was almost as dangerous as the climb. She has described running desperately short of oxygen on the way down, and how close she came to not making it back.

After Everest

Arunima went on to climb high peaks on other continents, including Kilimanjaro in Africa, Elbrus in Europe and Aconcagua in South America, as well as Mount Vinson in Antarctica.

In 2015 the Government of India awarded her the Padma Shri, one of the country's highest civilian honours. She told her story in a book, Born Again on the Mountain, and began working to set up a sports academy for children from poor and disabled backgrounds.

When she speaks to young people, she talks about the night by the railway track and about the summit, and about how the distance between them was covered one step at a time.

Want to read more?

Arunima Sinha's own memoir, Born Again on the Mountain, tells the full story in her own words, from the train to the top of the world.