The best-known citizen of the Indian hill town of Darjeeling, Tenzing Norkay, is in residence now, though unseasonably, for the year’s climbing in the Himalayas has begun and most of his Sherpa colleagues are off helping Westerners up the peaks. His presence reflects the change that has taken place in his affairs since May 29th of last year, when he and Edmund Hillary stood on the summit of Mount Everest. That feat earned Tenzing a rest from his career as a climber, which had been arduous, and plunged him into a new career, involving contracts, publicity, and politics, which is a good deal more lucrative but which puts him under another kind of strain. Not only is he, like many famous men, unschooled in the ways of publicity but he deals haltingly with English, its lingua franca. Just keeping track of his own life, therefore, demands hard concentration. Tenzing complains that he has lost twenty-four pounds since climbing Everest, and he says—though he probably doesn’t mean it—that if he had foreseen the results, he would never have made the climb. His troubles are compounded by an element of jealousy in Darjeeling—he is to some extent a prophet without honor in his own country—and by a public disagreement, which he is well aware of, as to whether he is a great man or only an able servant. “I thought if I climbed Everest whole world very good,” he said recently. “I never thought like this.”
Tenzing is at everyone’s disposal. He has fixed up a small museum in his Darjeeling flat, exhibiting his gear, trophies, and photographs, and he stands duty there from ten in the morning to four-thirty in the afternoon. He is a handsome man, sunburned and well groomed, with white teeth and a friendly smile, and he usually wears Western clothes of the Alpine sort—perhaps a bright silk scarf, a gray sweater, knee-length breeches, wool stockings, and thick-soled oxfords. These suit him splendidly. Redolent with charm, Tenzing listens intently to questions put to him, in all the accents of English, by tourists who come to look over his display, and answers as best he can, often laughing in embarrassment. He charges no admission fee, but has a collection box for less fortunate Sherpa climbers, and he seems to look on the ordeal as a duty to the Sherpas and to India as a whole. The other day, I, who have been bothering him, too, remarked on the great number of people he receives. “If I don’t,” he answered, “they say I am too big.” And he scratched his head and laughed nervously.
Tenzing’s rise to fame caused some hard feelings between India and Nepal over the question of his nationality. On his trip to England with the Everest party, he took along passports of both countries, but now it is pretty well settled that he is Indian by choice and long residence, Nepalese by birth, and Sherpa—Tibetan, that is—by stock. Odd as it may seem, this mixture is common, for the Sherpas long ago migrated from the high Tibetan wastes to Nepal, and in this century many of them have moved on to Darjeeling, looking for work; when Tenzing Norkay, or Tenzing Norkay Sherpa, came to Darjeeling in 1933, he was treading a well-worn path. This is the way he has decided to spell his name—he now has business cards—but a European anthropologist who knows Tibetan says that “Tenzin Norgya” would be a better phonetic rendering, and that an accurate transliteration would be “bsTan-aDzin Nor-rGyas,” the capital letters representing the stresses. The Sherpas don’t use surnames as we know them. Both “Tenzing,” which means “thought holder” or “thought grasper,” and “Norkay,” which means “increasing wealth,” are given names, and “Sherpa,” which means “man from the East,” is a caste or clan name.