SINCE WE MET, TSERING and I have rendezvoused often. "Que pasa?" he likes to say when I jump into the front seat.

Late on a cold night last January, we were parked on a sliver of sidewalk on the Lower East Side, near the corner of East First and Avenue A, outside Punjabi Grocery, another cabbie hangout, and across from Katz's Deli, the scene of Meg Ryan's famous fake orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. We'd just come from Williamsburg, where Tsering had gone to considerable effort to track down the hipster owner of a forgotten cell phone.

"Thanks," the guy shrugged, grudgingly handing over a tip that Tsering had politely requested before driving all the way from Manhattan, his meter darkened.

Tsering brushed it off, but he says he's routinely haggled with, harangued, stiffed, and abused by surly passengers. During a typical ten-hour, 150-mile shift, he might endure road-raging drivers, vomiting passengers, or the sights and sounds and aftermath of cab sex. "We all have our sorrows," he once confided, "but as a taxi driver, there are so many times that people give you shit. They say, 'This guy's a taxi driver. They're all the same.' "

Even other minorities hassle him. "Look, I know. I cannot be a racist," he said, "because I myself am a different race." But he seethes whenever he hears about a member of any minority group blowing it—getting involved in prostitution or drugs or just slacking off. He feels like they're wasting chances an honest, hardworking Sherpa would never miss.

Coming to America wasn't Tsering's first choice. All his life, he wanted to be a climber, like Tenzing Norgay. Technically, Tsering is Tenzing's grandnephew—his mother, Ang Phuri, is Tenzing's niece—but Sherpas make little distinction among members of the same clan, so Tsering was always considered a grandson. He and his younger sister, Lakpa Doma Sherpa, were raised in Ghang-la, the family house Tenzing was able to establish in Darjeeling after his famous climb. But early life for Tsering wasn't peaceful: His father, Gombu—a Gurkha-regiment soldier and an accomplished boxer and drinker—beat the boy and his mother, and the couple divorced. Gombu moved across town, shunned by the family.

Tsering remembered a steady stream of visitors, journalists, and film stars presenting themselves at Ghang-la to meet Tenzing, who endured the attention good-naturedly—for the most part. "Sometimes he was in very shabby clothes with a sickle in his hand," Tsering said, "and the Indian tourists used to come and say, 'Hey, gardener, your boss is here?' And he used to act very innocent and say, 'Oh, he's gone to the office' or 'He's gone to Switzerland.' And they'd go away."

Amid the tumult, Tsering became, in his own words, "a very naughty child." He told me a story that I found hard to believe until his sister, Lakpa, confirmed it: When Tsering was around 12, Tenzing caught him trying to sneak into the house through a window when he'd forgotten his keys. The next morning he hauled the boy to the stairwell, hung him upside down from a climbing rope, lashed him with a cane, and ordered the family servant not to untie him until the end of the day. The servant cut him down a short time later, the hard lesson learned.

"He was a very strict man, a man with principles," Tsering said. "And I respected him. But I could not look him in the eyes. When he looked at me, he saw my father, and he did not like him at all."

Mountaineering was all around Tsering at Ghang-la. Eight family members have summited Everest, from Nawang Gombu Sherpa, Tenzing's nephew, who accompanied Jim Whittaker on the first American ascent in 1963, to Tenzing's son Jamling Tenzing Norgay, whose memoir Touching My Father's Soul chronicled his own 1996 summit, and grandson Tashi Tenzing, who reached the top the next year. Every Sherpa knows their names.

"I wanted to climb Everest," Tsering told me several times. And for a while it looked like he would. In between schoolwork, he was a guest instructor at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, which Tenzing had established. He climbed to 18,000 feet during training excursions and worked several seasons at HMI's Kanchenjunga base camp.

But then, in 1989, on a trek near the India-Nepal border, Tsering woke up from a nightmare in which he'd seen dead friends and family. His heart palpitating at around 120 beats per minute, he staggered outside his hut, gasping for breath. When it happened again a few months later, while he was courting Nima, he knew something was seriously wrong. Several years passed before an echocardiogram showed that he had a right bundle branch block, a congenital and potentially fatal disorder that thwarts the flow of blood to the right front ventricle. Tsering's Everest dreams evaporated. He'd never felt like a true part of Tenzing's clan, and now he was even further outside it.

But thanks to the opportunities he'd received from being part of that family, guiding wasn't Tsering's only option. With a degree in political science and economics from the University of Darjeeling, he rethought his future, even as he continued to lead treks at lower elevations. Lakpa was already living in Richmond, married to an American, and, with financial help from family members, Tsering and Nima joined her, settling a few months later in New York. Leaving Norkhila with Ang Phuri was meant to be a temporary measure.

"My life is already burning now," Tsering said to me once, sounding more wistful than bitter. "I am like a candle. But the light which the candle gives is going to be good for the coming generations, which I can see in America."