At Nepal school, outpouring of grief for climber Nirmal Purja

As rescuers recovered the body of climbing legend Nirmal Purja on Sunday, grief rippled hundreds of kilometres away in Nepal at the school where he first displayed the grit that would make him world-famous. At the Small Heaven School in Chitwan district, friends, teachers and students gathered around a framed photograph of the 43-year-old British-Nepali climber, adorned with flowers. Lighting candles, they shared with AFP their memories of the boy they knew long before he became one of the most celebrated figures in modern mountaineering. “When he was missing, we were praying for him and spent sleepless nights,” Dhiraj Bahadur Panta, a school friend of Purja, told AFP, his voice quivering…