The Girl on Top of the World

Just after dawn on 25 May 2014, a girl in a thick down suit and an oxygen mask took her last few steps up a narrow ridge of snow. Around her, the sky was a deep, dark blue. Below her, the mountains of Nepal and Tibet stretched away like waves.

There was nowhere higher to go. She was standing on the summit of Mount Everest, 8,848 metres above the sea, the highest point on Earth.

Her name was Malavath Purna. She was thirteen years and eleven months old.

A village in Telangana

Purna was born in 2000 in Pakala, a village in the Nizamabad district of what is now Telangana. Her family belonged to a tribal community. Her parents worked as labourers in other people's fields, and money was always short.

She went to a government residential school for children from poor and marginalised families, run by the state's social welfare department. The school gave her free lessons, meals and a bed. It also gave her something her parents could never have afforded: a chance.

The rock

The head of the residential schools at the time, a police officer named R. S. Praveen Kumar, believed that children from poor homes should have the same adventures as anyone else. He started a programme to find students who might take up climbing.

Purna was chosen to join a rock-climbing camp at Bhongir, where a great granite rock rises above the town, with an old fort on top. She had never climbed anything like it. She was nervous of the height, but she kept going up, and the instructors noticed that she did not give up.

She was sent on to further training, first in Darjeeling, at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, and then in the high, cold mountains of Ladakh. There she saw snow for the first time. She learned to use ropes, ice axes and crampons, to walk for hours in thin air, and to live in tents in freezing cold.

Out of the many students who began, she and an older boy, Sadhanapalli Anand Kumar, were chosen to attempt Everest.

The climb

In the spring of 2014, the two teenagers travelled to Tibet with an experienced team of guides. They would climb Everest from the north side.

The expedition took weeks. Climbers must move slowly up the mountain and back down again, giving their bodies time to get used to the thin air. Above about 8,000 metres, there is so little oxygen that the body cannot recover; climbers call it the death zone.

Purna faced bitter wind, cold that could freeze skin in minutes, and long nights of little sleep. She has said in interviews that there were moments when she was frightened. She kept going.

On the morning of 25 May, she and Anand reached the summit. Purna became the youngest girl ever to climb Mount Everest.

Coming home

When she came home, she was met with garlands, crowds and cameras. Newspapers across India told her story. Her parents, who had never travelled far from their village, were suddenly receiving visitors from all over the country.

What moved many people most was not only her age. It was where she had come from. She was a tribal girl from a poor family, at a government school, who had been given one chance and had taken it with both hands.

Afterwards

Purna went back to school and carried on studying. She also carried on climbing. In the years that followed she went on to climb the highest mountains of other continents too.

In 2017 her story was made into a film, Poorna, directed by Rahul Bose.

She has spoken often about how important it was that someone believed in children like her.

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Indian newspapers such as The Hindu reported Malavath Purna's climb and her homecoming in May and June 2014. The film Poorna tells her story for a wider audience.