Nirmal Purja (1983–2026): The man who taught ordinary hearts to climb

Somewhere above 6,600 metres, on a slope of the Karakoram that most of us will only ever see in photographs, a tracker on a wrist goes still. For a few hours the dot on the screen seems to drift, and those of us who never met him, who only ever watched him from the warm, safe distance of a laptop screen or a Netflix queue, let ourselves believe the mountain might, just this once, give him back. Then a drone lifts into the thin light above Broad Peak and finds him lying in the snow, among the men who had roped in beside him, and the belief dissolves the way breath dissolves in cold air. Nirmal Purja — Nimsdai, as the world had come to call him, the way you’d say the name of someone you loved without needing his surname — died on 30 July 2026, buried with nine companions in an avalanche that broke loose without asking permission from anyone’s plans. He was 43. Somewhere, a film that had made a stranger like me believe in impossible things is still sitting on a shelf, unfinished business now, its final reel added without warning.

I did not know him. I say that plainly, the way you say it at a funeral for someone loved from far away — a face on a screen, a man doing something so far beyond the register of an ordinary life that watching it felt like watching weather. Grief does not check credentials before it arrives. It came anyway, the way rivers arrive at valleys they were never invited into.

So let the story move the way memory moves — not in a line, but in circles, in flashes, the way a life replays itself at the edges of sleep.

A village called Dana…

Folded into the shadow of Dhaulagiri, sixteen hundred metres above the sea, where the mist came down each morning like a hand closing over a candle, and the air itself seemed to be rehearsing the thinness he would spend his whole life climbing toward. A boy without flip-flops. A father who had been a Gurkha; a mother from a farming family; a marriage that had crossed a line Nepal’s old caste arithmetic refused to forgive, so both families turned their backs. Three older brothers put on soldiers’ boots so their youngest could sit, instead, in an English-speaking classroom and learn to dream in a second language. He learned to kick-box before he learned to climb. He was, in other words, ordinary — poor, cut off — before he became the opposite of all of it.

A rifle butt, and a bullet that does not find his neck…

He joined the Brigade of Gurkhas in 2003, and in 2009 became the first Gurkha ever accepted into the Special Boat Service (the special forces unit of the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy), serving through a decade of undeclared wars as a specialist in weather no ordinary body survives comfortably. Then, in 2018, offered the rarer invitation of the SAS, he said no — walked away, gave up a pension he called life-changing, and turned toward something that paid in nothing but altitude.

A trek that refused to end where it was supposed to…

In 2012 he went to Everest Base Camp as a tourist goes, and simply kept walking, up to the summit of Lobuche East, with no mountaineering history behind him — as though the mountain had recognised something in him before he recognised it himself. Two years later he stood on Dhaulagiri, the peak that had watched over his childhood, and a circle must have closed somewhere. Everest came in 2016. In 2017 he led thirteen fellow Gurkhas to its summit to honour two hundred years of a regiment’s service, then climbed it again himself that same season, and Lhotse, and Makalu — as if the calendar had become a mountain he meant to finish early.

Six months that broke the clock...

In 2019 he did what the old order of mountaineering had needed the better part of a decade to do — all fourteen of the world’s peaks above 8,000 metres — and did it in six months and six days, a compression of time so violent it still reads like fiction. Annapurna (8,091 m), Dhaulagiri (8,167 m), Kangchenjunga (8,586 m); then Everest (8,848 m), Lhotse (8,516 m) and Makalu (8,485 m) inside forty-eight hours, three summits stitched together like a single sentence. Across Pakistan — Nanga Parbat (8,125 m), Gasherbrum I (8,080 m), Gasherbrum II (8,034 m), K2 (8,611 m), and Broad Peak (8,051 m), the very mountain that would, seven Julys later, close its hand around him for good. And finally Tibet — Cho Oyu (8,188 m), Manaslu (8,163 m), and on the 29th of October, Shishapangma (8,027 m), the door swinging shut on a feat that made “Nimsdai” a name spoken by people, like me, who had never before cared what an eight-thousander was. A photograph he took of a traffic jam of climbers near Everest’s summit went round the world and became, unintentionally, a parable about crowds and vanity and the mountain’s indifference to both. A Netflix film carried his face into living rooms on every continent, mine among them, and something in a lot of us that had gone quiet from ordinary disappointments sat up and paid attention again.

Kindness, the part the record books forget to underline…

Descending Annapurna, he spent himself trying to save a stranger who did not survive. Weeks later, at 8,400 metres, he gave his own oxygen away so two other climbers could breathe. 'You can’t call yourself a climber', he said once, 'and not help in that situation' — a sentence that, quietly, is more of an epitaph than any record ever could be.

Winter, and a summit no one had reached in that season for over thirty years…

In January 2021 he and nine fellow Nepali climbers stood atop K2 in the dead of winter — Purja alone among them without bottled oxygen, breathing only what the mountain allowed, becoming the first person ever to manage it.

An ordinary house in Hampshire, briefly, between expeditions…

A wife, Suchi Purja, herself the daughter of a Gurkha soldier. A daughter of their own. A man who used the strange gift of his fame to insist, again and again, that the Sherpas and high-altitude workers who fix the ropes and carry the loads deserved more than a footnote in someone else’s glory. There was a shadow too, and honesty asks that it be named plainly: in May 2024, two women publicly accused him of sexual harassment and assault during expeditions in 2022 and 2023, allegations he denied in full through his lawyer, calling them 'false and defamatory.' No life this large, it seems, arrives without something unresolved folded into it.

Photo courtesy: The Post

The ink used in Purja’s tattoo of the 14 eight-thousanders also incorporates DNA from his wife, mother and brothers (Photo: Montblanc)

The final scene, though none of us knew it yet was final...

Days before he died, he wrote that his plan had changed — that ticking off Broad Peak first would leave only Cho Oyu between him and something no one in history had ever done: all fourteen eight-thousanders, climbed twice, without oxygen. “The mission shifts,” he wrote. “The compass holds.” And to the mountain itself, almost like a small prayer whispered before sleep: 'I ask for nothing but safe passage up and back down. The moment my foot leaves basecamp, it’s 100%. Always has been. Always will be'. The mountain did not answer that prayer. On 30 July, between camps on Broad Peak’s west ridge, it took him along with Pur Bahadur Gurung, Nima Sherpa, Kili Pemba Sherpa, Nadhira Al Harthy, Mallory Geis, and four others whose names deserve to be spoken in the same breath as his. Nepal’s prime minister said their physical journeys had only been interrupted, that the history of their courage would go on climbing without them.

I never met him. I only watched, from very far away, a man who convinces the world that impossible was a border, not a wall. That is a strange thing to grieve. And yet here I am, an ordinary man on an ordinary evening, grieving it anyway — the way you grieve a lamp that has gone out somewhere at the top of the sky, one you never touched, but always steered by.