Mera Peak: The Mountain That Waits in Silence
There are mountains you plan to climb, and then there are mountains that seem to wait for you. Not impatiently, but in silence, like a letter unopened for years, quietly marking time. Mera Peak was one of those.
Long before I traced its ridges with my eyes, I had only a number, 6476 metres, and a vague notion that it stood somewhere in the shadowed folds of eastern Nepal. Not as famous as Everest, not as photographed as Ama Dablam, Mera is the highest of Nepal’s trekking peaks, but it hides itself from the crowds. It stands slightly apart from the great Khumbu caravan routes, watching quietly from a distance as others chase glory to the north. To reach it, you must walk for days through quiet forests and forgotten valleys. There are no airports near its flanks, no tea houses crowded with selfie sticks. It waits in stillness, and it demands the same of you.
Mera is not a single peak, but a crown with three summits: Mera South, Mera Central, and Mera North. Most climbers aim for Mera Central, accessible by a long glaciated slope that requires neither technical ice climbing nor ropes under good conditions. And yet this simplicity is deceiving. What Mera lacks in technical complexity, it compensates for in scale, altitude, and solitude. The glacier that guards its summit must be crossed in the thin air of nearly 6000 metres, where the wind cuts deeper and time moves differently. Every step becomes a dialogue between the will and the body.
Its summit, when the skies open, offers what many believe to be the most awe-inspiring panorama in all of Nepal. Five of the six highest mountains on earth can be seen from its crown: Everest, Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu, and Kangchenjunga. It is a view so vast it seems drawn not on paper, but across the bones of the earth itself.
The first recorded ascent of Mera was made in 1953 by Jimmy Roberts and Sen Tenzing, though locals almost certainly stood there long before them. Roberts, often regarded as the father of commercial trekking in Nepal, did not treat Mera as a conquest, but as a teacher. A mountain that offered challenge without cruelty. A summit that could awaken something sacred in those who were not mountaineers by trade, but pilgrims by heart.
The best seasons for Mera are spring and autumn, when the monsoon has passed or not yet begun. In April and May, the forests below bloom with rhododendrons, their petals carpeting the trail like silent prayers. In October and November, the skies sharpen and the cold returns, carving the landscape into clarity. These are not just weather windows. They are spiritual corridors, moments when the mountain opens itself to those who approach with patience.
Mera is not a mountain that calls to the proud. It does not reward arrogance or speed. It requires humility, stillness, and listening. It is not a mountain you climb to prove something to others. It is a mountain you climb to learn something about yourself.
For many, a journey into these mountains begins with Everest Base Camp, the fabled gateway to the world’s tallest peak. It is the dream of the ordinary dreamer. The weekend hiker. The urban soul who saves for years, pacing city parks and neighbourhood trails, whispering to themselves that one day they will stand where the giants begin. I had been one of them. I had made that walk once and expected to feel something definitive at the end. A triumph, perhaps. Or closure.
But that was not what meeting Everest gave me.
Standing at Base Camp, with wind carving through stone and ice, I felt no completion. Only the sense that something deeper had begun. Beside me stood Bhupal Magar, my companion and guide on that earlier journey. A man of quiet strength and unfaltering patience. We had walked for days together, through cold mornings and sunlit valleys, and yet it was in that moment, surrounded by rock, glacier, and the sound of distant avalanches, that I realised I was not standing at the end of anything. What was supposed to be a final summit was instead a doorway. I had come expecting applause from the mountain, and instead it asked me a question I was not ready for. What next?
That question followed me home. It whispered to me on city walks. It tightened my chest in the still hours of the night. Everest had shown me that I was capable of more than I believed. But it had also reminded me that the most profound summits are internal. Real altitude is not measured in metres, but in moments of surrender, awe, and transformation.
And so I came back.
Not for fame.
Not for a ticked box or a higher peak.
But for the silence that Mera promised.
A silence I longed to hear again.
A silence I required.
From the dust-choked chaos of Kathmandu to the steep, stone paths of Kharikhola, I would begin again. My guide, Pema Sherpa, or Pema Dai as I called him, met me before dawn with a gentle smile and the quiet confidence of someone who belongs to the mountains. His older brother, Nyamgal, would join us later. Between the three of us, something wordless formed. Not a team, but a fellowship of sorts. The beginning of a strong relationship.
William James once wrote, “The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.” I came to know the weight of those words not in theory, but in the quiet ache of lived experience. My world was shifting beneath my feet. I was preparing to leave behind nearly a decade in corporate life, stepping away from the predictable rhythms of GE into the uncertain and human centred terrain of public service.
For nine years, I had worked as an operations and contracts specialist. I knew the systems, mastered the numbers, met the deadlines. But somewhere along the way, something vital began to fade. My growth stalled. My voice quietened. I became a fixture in the background, present, reliable, yet unseen.
Each day I operated in silos, buried in spreadsheets and isolated from the people my work was meant to serve. The disconnection was not just professional, it was personal. I had lost sight of my own value, my own purpose. I wasn’t burnt out. I was forgotten. And that, I realised, is its own kind of exhaustion. I constantly questioned my sense of worth.
And all the while, I knew what was coming. We all did. That one day, inevitably, the announcement would come. The day when entire departments would be made redundant. The day when I and many others would be told, quietly and efficiently, that our time was up. That day arrived, as expected. But for me, it brought no shock. Only confirmation. I had been waiting not just for an end, but for a beginning. Something more human, more exposed, more real. I was not leaving GE because the door had closed. I was leaving because I could no longer stay somewhere that no longer saw me. I needed to step into work that mattered. Work that broke the silence. Work that demanded all of me. But before I could do that, I needed to face myself. Stripped of titles, away from roles, I needed to find out if anything was left beneath the tiredness. The Himalayas would give me that answer.
I had trained in criminology and the social sciences, and that calling had never left me. It ran deeper than academic interest. Ever since childhood, I had been drawn to the question of why people harm others, especially the vulnerable. I would read about serial killers and violent offenders not out of fascination with brutality, but because I needed to understand the architecture of cruelty. Growing up in India, I had witnessed pain and injustice early. My own boyhood was marked by hardship, by the kind of wounds that never fully show on the surface but change how you see the world. I saw how power could be abused. I saw what it meant to feel unprotected. And perhaps, without realising it, I began to search for answers. What makes someone hurt a child? What turns a person into a predator? What is broken, and can it be understood or prevented? That quiet pursuit followed me into adulthood, into my studies, and now into the work I was preparing to do. I was not entering public service simply to fulfil a job. I was stepping into the long shadow of my own past, hoping to become the kind of person I once needed, and to carry that strength forward on behalf of others.
These roles demand more than academic knowledge or professional experience. They demand resilience. Not the kind often advertised on CVs, but the quiet, interior kind that reveals itself in silence, in loneliness, in the face of human suffering that offers no easy answers. To work in child protection or corrective services is to enter the most painful corners of other people’s lives. You are there not to judge, and not to flinch, but to act.
This work asks you to witness trauma. Real trauma. Without letting it shatter you. It requires the strength to hear the pain of children, the rage of parents, the grief of those caught in systems of harm, and still respond with clarity and calm. It asks for a steady hand in chaos. For a heart that can remain open but not bleed into every story. You cannot afford to be paralysed by empathy. You must let it guide you, not drown you. To survive in this work is not to harden, but to refine. To become porous enough to feel, yet strong enough not to fall apart. That is a difficult balance. It is not taught in classrooms. It is tested in real time, and often alone.
I needed to know if I had that in me. If I could be the person who listens fully, sees clearly, and still acts wisely. If I could be relied upon when the suffering of others becomes unbearable. Not to rescue everyone, but to be present, to stay, and to help. And I knew I could not answer that question in the safety of familiar routines. I needed a trial. Something honest. Something unrelenting. Something like the Himalayas.
Nepal is my retreat. A place of solitude and soul-searching. A world apart from the chaos and clutter of daily life, where I could hear my own thoughts clearly, where I could breathe differently. The mountains have always received me without judgement. Climbing Mera Peak felt like the right way to ask the question I had not dared to put into words. Am I fit to carry on? Not just to serve, but to live.
Working in GE had left me hollowed out. The silence around me had become deafening. My role, once filled with potential, had slowly narrowed until it became a space I barely recognised. I was present, but dead and unseen. Over time, something in me began to erode. I questioned not just my value as a worker, but my value as a person. Was I still capable of anything meaningful? Was I still needed in this world? Was my life worth living? Did I need to live? These questions arrived without drama, but with quiet weight, the kind that settles in the chest and does not easily move.
I needed to know, with complete honesty, whether I still had the strength, the heart, the worth. Not in the eyes of others, but in my own. And if I didn’t, I had made peace with that too.
In the quietest corner of my heart, I carried a wish. That if I was found unworthy, I might slip unnoticed into a crevasse, or vanish beneath the snow, and be buried in the mountains that have always felt more like home than the world below. Not as an act of despair, but as a final resting place. Embraced by the very peaks that had held so many of my tears, my prayers, my silences. It was not death I sought, but truth. And if the mountains found me lacking, I was willing to stay there.
What followed was not merely an expedition but a fourteen-day pilgrimage. Through rhododendron forests, bowing in monasteries that echoed with prayer, receiving the quiet blessings of holy Buddhist monks. Through cold mornings and long silences, along breathless ridgelines and across the fragile stillness of snowfields.
The mountains do not care who you are. They strip you bare, and in doing so, reveal something you may have forgotten was there. Not ambition. Not strength. But clarity.
This post is an introduction of that climb.
One day at a time.
One step at a time.
Toward the mountain that had been waiting all along.
In the next few days I shall post more images…..please standby.
Copyright © Tales from the Horizon, 2025
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