The Last Dance – An Open Letter To Ali Sadpara
Dear Ali bhai,
I'll never forget the only time I saw you. It was at the Value of Life event in Islamabad a few months ago, but it feels like yesterday. As soon as our eyes met, I waved to you from the audience seats. You placed your hand over your heart with the slight bow and smiled. A flower bloomed in my heart and continues to blossom to this very day.
When Saad started mentioning your amazing feats, everything around you diminished. Your stature rose like a giant standing as tall as the mighty K2, stretching to the heavens.
Throughout this storytelling event, I pondered what nature of people capture the spirit of adventure?
No one but mountaineers.
They symbolize adventure and are a prime example of the relentless pursuit of dreams. Your breed are true explorers who step out of comfort zones to forward human potential and experience. How else could we have made it to far corners of the world if not for the brave ones who left their homes in Africa two million years ago and traversed unchartered plains, deserts, oceans, and mighty mountain ranges to explore what lay beyond the horizon? The remainder of humanity merely followed in their mighty footsteps. In days gone by, those adventurers risked their lives to help us survive and evolve. Today, you carry on that legacy and inspire us by showing how to make the impossible possible.
You shouldered other people's loads on your back in places higher than eagles fly while nurturing dreams in your heart. You gave other people your strong, steady hand on deadly slopes to help them achieve their goals. While they captured all the headlines, you remained obscure to most in your own country. For those who don't know your achievements, how will they know the pain you endured?
But the pain didn't matter to you.
You did everything with utmost unconditional love in a selfless manner: to help others, to bring joy to everyone you met, and to make your country proud.
As time passed, you climbed higher and higher. As the difficulties mounted, you smiled broader and broader. The striking lines on your cheeks, deep as crevasses, reveal that you lived every moment either in extreme pain or joy. Not in between.
Like a moth dances around the flame, you danced and danced and danced around the mountains as if charming and seducing them. While for others, mountains proved a battleground, for you, they were your dancefloor.
"Ali bhai is our biggest superstar, our hero!" your friend Saad always said to me.
Come back, our hero, for this life is full of hidden crevasses, and every one of us has a long climb ahead. Hold our hand. Show us how we traverse our paths, cross our canyons, navigate our mountains. Inspire us anew.
The reason we met was that Imtiaz Ali, the mountain guide from Shimshal, had died on Italian-Pak expedition in 2019. Through the Value of Life project, we wanted to acknowledge our mountaineers and build a support system for them.
Inspired by you and other heroes, I covered a series of stories on local mountaineers in Shimshal. You were next on my list. Little did I know that instead of writing your heroic feats, I would be drafting a letter to you.
I have so many unanswered questions. Why did you go to K2 in winter? What happened after the Bottleneck? And why was it your last dance? My heart longs to know, to understand.
I believe, the K2 summit was afraid of the dark winter nights and didn't let you leave the mountain. So, it held you close to its heart like a kid hugs a teddy bear tight before going to bed. Now K2 has covered itself with a blanket of clouds and gone to sleep with you. Sweet dreams.
Before you were the dreamer, and K2 was the dream. Now, K2 is the dreamer, and you are the dream.
Maybe, one day, we will wake up, and you will be back again, either in this or another world.
I'll wait for the day when our eyes meet again. I'll put your story to paper as you narrate your adventures and what kept your heart warm on those cold nights on K2.
And after I've written everything and taken a million photos of you, we will call it a wrap and start the celebrations. Oh, what a party we'll have!
We will summon angels to play the drums. They will thunder seven skies with divine beats and send everyone and everything into a trance: humans, animals, birds, trees, plants, and waterfalls, all waving and swinging to the mystical rhythms of the music that transcends space and time, that moves right to the heart.
All fourteen 8,000-m mountains will travel from far and wide corners and dance in a circle around you, each trying to win your heart, the same way you tried to win their heart in your life. Now, in the middle, you will dance like a whirling dervish.
As the night grows darker, you will gesture and invite peaks to twirl with you in the circle one by one until you have danced with them all except one. Then in the darkest hour of the night, you will finally invite the most beautiful of all, the Chogori, the K2, inside.
And so will the final dance begin: hands in hands, arms in arms, singing, spinning, bending, rising, gliding, and stretching, exploring all possibilities in dance. On and on. Until the end of time. Until the end of the universe. Maybe even beyond that.
Until you two become one again. One majestic mountain.
The mountain—far beyond any mountaineer can go—any angels can fly above—and any storyteller can write about.
All anyone can do is watch the mountain from a far distance with their jaw dropped. Slowly, they will notice lines appear on the face of the eastern slopes—curving and becoming bolder and broader.
The longer everyone looks upon them, the more familiar the lines will become. They have seen those lines on someone’s face before.
And then there will be one big dance, one tremendous celebration, as all meld into one.
After that, everyone will be reborn to the truth. I. We, They. You. And your beloved K2!
Love,