No Barriers

Home for just a week, Arjun and Ellie sat on his bed, leafing through a stack of picture books. When they’d finish one, Arjun would pop off the bed and stand in front of the nearby bookshelf stuffed with more children’s books, selecting the next one. He pulled one out with a picture of the solar system on the cover and brought it back to the bed. Very interested now, his eyes darted from planet to planet. He pointed to all the rings of Saturn, and Ellie named the planet. His finger pointed to another planet, and another. Ellie named them all. When he pointed to Earth, she said, “Our planet. Earth!” She pointed to Arjun and then to herself. “That’s where we live.”

Ellie was confused, but then it dawned on her. Arjun had somehow surmised he lived on a round ball, but he had traveled so far on the airplane, he thought he had arrived on another planet. When Ellie shared her observation with me, I said, “Probably feels just as alien as another planet.”

Ellie retrieved our globe and placed it in Arjun’s lap. “This is Earth,” she said.

Spinning it around, she showed him Colorado. Another spin and she pointed to Nepal.

“This is where you used to live,” she said. “Then you flew in an airplane all the way over to Colorado.” She made her finger take off from Nepal and buzz over the route. Arjun touched the globe and spun it round and round a few times, but soon he lost interest and grabbed another book.

As Emma and I sat listening, I tried to imagine what Arjun must have been thinking. He’d never seen a globe. He had never flown before. He didn’t really know where he was living before and had no sense about where Colorado was. He was lost. Then Ellie separated one of the WELCOME HOME helium balloons the neighbors had given us. She led Arjun out to our back deck, which faced west toward the Rocky Mountains. In the previous days, Ellie had sat out here with Arjun, watching the sun set below the hills and disappearing for the night. In the mornings, she’d shown him the sun again, rising to the east. “There it is again!” she’d exclaim.

Now, handing Arjun the balloon, she pointed to the mountains and said, “Nepal—this way.” She gently took the string and let it go. “Nepal is a long way away,” she said, “but that balloon could fly all the way there. Namaste, Nepal!” she shouted with a grin.

“There it goes,” Emma said. We all waved good-bye as the balloon rose into the sky, turned into a tiny dot, and disappeared.

Emma was so excited to have a little brother, before leaving for Nepal, she’d insisted they share a room together. On the dresser that separated the two twin beds, she shoved all her little toys, books, pictures, and jewelry to the right side, near her bed. Then she paused and shoved her possessions over even more. “He can have more than half,” she said exuberantly.

Arjun took full advantage. He didn’t understand his side versus Emma’s side. Emma watched in horror as he instantly dove into her prized collection of stuffed piglet dolls and flung them around, performing kung fu kicks to their heads.

At first, it was hard to tell what Arjun needed. We were divided by a language barrier, but we got by with a lot of pointing and hand gesturing. We also had a friend, Lhakpa Sherpa, who owned the local Nepali restaurant, come over and speak with Arjun in Nepalese. However, Arjun’s responses were brief and didn’t reveal much.

But there were deeper barriers that made the one of language seem easy. While Emma had cried over the years, letting us know her needs, Arjun was stoic and silent. It was like his time in the orphanage had forced him to suppress his emotions, making it tricky to assess if he was hungry, tired, or cold. Whether he was getting stuck by vaccinations at the doctor’s office or falling down and skinning his knee, he never cried. That made sense, I thought. You learn to cry as a way to let your protector know you’re upset or in pain, but if no one is there to hear you, to soothe you, then it loses its purpose. We couldn’t even trust Arjun to nod yes or shake his head no. Instead, he’d do a head bobble, common in Nepal, tipping his head left and right. It often indicated a noncommittal response as if to say, “Either way,” or “As you wish,” or “I have no idea.”

Arjun, however, couldn’t hide his feelings forever. At a point, they’d bubble up into fits of frustration. While Emma attended school, Ellie and Arjun went on field trips around the Denver area. The Colorado Railroad Museum was near our home. It seemed to us like the kind of place a boy would love. One time, at a neighbor’s house, we’d observed him playing with a small electric train set; Ellie had noticed that he loved moving the little lever that caused the trains to switch directions on the tracks. He seemed utterly transfixed by the mechanical movement of the train and by his ability to control its direction with the lever, so we figured he’d love real steam engines and locomotives, but after climbing aboard his third train, Arjun said, “No trains!” Just like that, he was done.

Halfway home, as Arjun sat silently scowling, Ellie figured it out. These were relics from the past. They didn’t move or do anything. They didn’t actually work! When Ellie told me the story, I laughed, picturing his mind bubbling over and the words dying to spill out: “Stupid, no-good, broken trains!”

Soon, Arjun was speaking basic words of necessity, like rice, bike, or train. He then added a yes or no to the item, and it was often a no. “No white!” when he’d point at a stick of butter or bowl of sugar, both things he’d never tasted in Nepal. “No! No! No!” We heard the word a lot.

If Arjun was going to enter kindergarten, he had a lot of catching up to do, and Ellie threw herself into the task with the same fervor she’d had in bringing him home. She read him nursery rhymes and books that taught alphabet and numbers, all the things she did with Emma when she was just a baby. We all jumped in as well. I had a pile of books with illustrations and the text, both in print and in Braille, so I could read to him as well. He especially liked a series about Froggy embarking on different adventures, like Froggy Goes to School and Froggy Gets Dressed. Similar to Arjun, Froggy was constantly putting his boots on the wrong feet, putting his shirt on backward, or forgetting a glove. When Arjun learned that Froggy got all ready to play in the snow but had forgotten to put on his underwear, his laughter couldn’t be contained in one room. He fell off the bed in fits of joy over Froggy’s mishap.

Often, I’d walk into the kids’ room to hear Emma and Arjun together on one bed, Emma reading him stories, with Arjun staring at the pictures, mesmerized. He caught on so fast. He was forming sentences in English in just a month.

There was no stopping Arjun in his inexhaustible effort to learn everything. When he spotted the little bike in the garage, he demanded to try it. Once Emma’s bike, we had painted over the pink with shiny gold and removed the sparkle streamers. We attached some training wheels and figured the snowbanks would soften his falls. Ellie strapped on his helmet, and he rode out of the garage on his maiden voyage. He’d weave up and down the sidewalk, with one of us right behind him. He’d tip over into the left snowbank, and then into the right, while I yelled out, “Watch out for the crazy taxi driver!” Within an hour, Arjun was riding solo, with no intervention. On the third day, he pointed to the training wheels and said, “No!” He was a quick learner for sure.

By the fifth day, Arjun pushed his bike up the steep hill above our house, insisting on riding back down again. We’d given him plenty of lessons on how to brake by pressing his foot down on the pedal and skidding to a stop. Ellie reinforced it one more time by tapping his feet and saying, “Remember, never let your feet leave those pedals.” But at the top of the hill, instead of coasting, Arjun started pedaling, shooting off in Kathmandu taxi-driver style. I heard Ellie running down the hill after him and yelling, “Stop! Stop!” and then he flew by me, with Ellie breathing hard close behind him. I heard one of our neighbors standing in his driveway say, “Oh! That’s not going to end well.”

I followed behind, and when I reached Ellie, she gave me the play-by-play. It had started by Arjun’s feet flying off the pedals and flailing out to the sides, while the pedals whipped around faster and faster. He veered around a parked car, avoided a mailbox by an inch, ran up another driveway, and crashed into a big hedge. Getting up out of the sticks and leaves, he stood silently next to his downed bike, his hands hanging limply by his sides and his face expressionless. He seemed a little in shock. Ellie took a deep breath, hugged him tightly, and then immediately had him go a short way back up the hill and coast down again. This time, however, she kept a firm hand on his bike seat, with his feet squarely on the pedals.

Speaking English and riding his bike had come so quickly, it was puzzling how difficult other adjustments were, especially rituals most families took for granted. Ellie showed him how to brush his teeth, using toothpaste, and they practiced together, but when she’d send him into the bathroom on his own, she’d check afterward to find the toothbrush dry and the toothpaste clearly unused. From then on, we had to implement the “fresh breath test,” with Arjun blowing in my face. There were a lot of angry moments when I’d have to send him back into the bathroom for another go.

He was also still peeing in his bed, a problem we knew about from Sabitri and from our experience with him in Nepal. It wasn’t a big deal and common for a lot of little boys, but we thought with the right tools and structure, we could make some progress. One of our first rules became no drinking water just before bedtime, but Ellie immediately caught him filling the water glass on his bathroom counter and drinking it to the bottom. “We’re smart people,” I said. “Just take the cup away.” But the next night, Ellie caught him guzzling water straight from the faucet, and not just a little bit. It was as though he was dying of thirst in the desert.

We also made sure he was peeing before bed. When Ellie would stand next to him, he’d have no problem going, and he soon began making it through the night. We then began sending him into the bathroom independently. I’d stand outside and hear the toilet flushing, but we couldn’t figure out why the problem was resurfacing. It was all explained when Ellie secretly observed Arjun’s nightly ritual. He’d enter the bathroom, wait beside the bowl for ten full seconds, flush the toilet, and come out to wash his hands—all without actually peeing.

The dinner table became another ongoing battle. Arjun would inhale his food, bypassing the chewing phase. That, combined with the fact we still hadn’t fully eradicated the parasites from his belly, was causing him to be sick after most meals. Ellie wanted to slow him down, trying different approaches like showing him a mirror of his face, with food plastered from his eyelids to his ears, or even pulling his plate away for one-minute breaks. At one point, she turned away for just a moment, and Arjun downed his entire glass of juice, then proceeded to throw up all over the table.

She also discovered him gouging marks on the underside of our kitchen table with a pen. Ellie put him in a time-out and made him sit on his bed.

After ten minutes, she went to retrieve him, but he refused to move. He sat there for the next hour as if to say, “Oh yeah? You wanna put me in a time-out? I’ll show you. I can sit here all day.”

After a while, I heard things crashing and ripping. Ellie had given Arjun a bunch of posters from her classroom when she was a teacher, and as I rushed into his room, he was tearing those posters off the wall and throwing them onto the ground in a rage. When I entered, he tried to slip past me toward the door. Now that he knew a balloon could get all the way to Nepal, perhaps he was going to try to walk there, but I caught him and swept him up into my arms.

He fought me with all his strength, pinching, kicking, and screaming. I sat down on his bed and held him tight against my chest, trying to calm him down as he flailed around, trying to escape. The harder I held him, the harder he fought. His teeth clamped down on my arm, and I pulled his head away. “It’s okay, buddy,” I said. “It’s gonna be okay.”

The struggle lasted a full thirty minutes, and when he finally gave up, his body went limp, and he fell into a kind of muttering slumber in my arms. “This is your home, and it’s gonna be okay,” I whispered as I tucked him in under his covers.

Finally, Ellie said, in her quiet way, “Do you miss anyone else? Your mother?”

Ellie wondered if Arjun was remembering Sabitri, the head of the orphanage, but she had a strong feeling that wasn’t the case. Being adopted herself, she knew the search for your parents never ended. The loss was always there.

Ellie had him repeat it several times, and it came out the next time as “Jai” and “Jaya,” but neither of us understood the word, even after Ellie looked it up in a Nepali dictionary. It remained a mystery.

In March, Ellie started taking him to kindergarten and would stay with him for the half day. Arjun was intensely curious and loved being around kids his age. Even though he still spoke with broken English, it didn’t stop him from trying to answer every question, whether he knew the answer or not. He loved being first and would wolf down his lunch and sprint out onto the playground to make sure he was the first to the swings. Whenever his teacher would say, “Line up,” he would shove kids out of the way to be in front. At home, we practiced what an organized line looked like. Ellie, Emma, and I would form a line and show him how to calmly take his place, but in school, he’d just push to the front again. I thought about Sabitri’s words describing Arjun in one of our original letters: “He just will do and do and do or say and say and say until he has what he wants.”

A couple of days later, we were walking as a family down a narrow sidewalk. It was single file, but Arjun kept darting in front of us and sprinting way ahead. Most worrisome was that he was crossing driveways and small streets without looking left or right. When we finally caught up to him, Ellie ordered him to walk behind her, but every chance he got, he’d shoot by, with Ellie calling him back again. Finally, it was a showdown. The next time Arjun tried to push by, Ellie shuffled right and blocked him. He made a quick cut to the left, and she matched him. After that, he took it as a personal challenge, waiting for a gap to form, before rocketing through the gauntlet, but Ellie would nimbly cut him off. By the end, he was walking directly behind her, feet shuffling, head hanging, like a wild stallion that had just been broken.

As Arjun resigned himself to all the rules and structure of our life, we left plenty of time for play. I loved listening to him on the playground running around with other kids. With little boys especially, there wasn’t much language required, defined rules, or deep connections. The physical play itself seemed to be its own language, with its own underlying rhythms.

Home from school, in the afternoon, he kept right on playing. Our basement had a thick wrestling mat across an open room, and we’d wrestle and battle for hours. Our favorite game was called Force Field, in which Arjun could choose from a host of magic tools and weapons like the club of destruction (a pool noodle), or the ball of disaster (an inflatable exercise ball). He’d shield himself with an impenetrable force field (a gymnastics mat), while I’d pound his defenses with the ball of disaster and the club of destruction, trying to break through. Arjun, wrapped in his force field, would be flung around the room as I reached through the gaps in the shield, his little feet and hands scurrying away like a turtle into his shell.

Often Emma would join in, and we’d play our second favorite game, Mechanical Bull. They’d both get on my back and slide the imaginary quarter into the slot, which was my ear. Then the mechanical bull would begin bucking and kicking, while they clutched the hood of my sweatshirt. The goal was to hang on for a full minute. They never made it to the end, always winding up in a pile, with the mechanical bull snorting over the tangle of bodies.

Ellie had been attending kindergarten with Arjun for a month, and he was adapting and adjusting pretty well. He’d even written the following poem, which Ellie and I loved and displayed on the refrigerator:

—BY ARJUN

Then one morning, I was surprised when Ellie came home from the school alone. She explained they’d been sitting in a circle with all the other kids and the teacher, when Arjun turned to her and said, “Go home, Mommy. Go home.”

I laughed. “In other words, he told you to beat it.” Part of me marveled at his independent streak, but another part of me worried he didn’t yet have the maturity to back it up. Unfortunately, that was proven right a couple of weeks later.

Ellie and I were picking Arjun up from school, and the teacher said that she needed to talk to us.

“What happened?” Ellie asked, concerned.

“A fighting incident in Foothills Forest,” she said. “You know that little stand of trees near the playground that the kids go to during recess? They build a fort in there with planks and branches and bark. We encourage cooperation, and once recess is over, the next group of kids come out, and they sometimes dismantle the fort and start their own or build on it more.”

I could imagine where this was heading, but I kept quiet and listened.

“Well,” she went on, “Arjun had built a fort all recess, and when it was time for him to come in, and the next group arrived…”

“What did he do?” asked Ellie.

“He used a stick to defend his fort,” the teacher said. “A few of the older boys ran back into the school, crying. They were afraid of him.”

I pictured Arjun squatting down, crouched in the pounce position, then leaping up and going into full-on Nepalese-Ninja street-fighting mode, calling out “Hi-yah!” and cracking a pack of fifth graders in the kneecaps. I didn’t know whether to be proud or mortified.

“We’ll talk to him, of course,” Ellie said. He was banned from Foothills Forest for the next few months.

What was most puzzling to me was that one minute, Arjun might be fighting off a pack of kids twice his age, and the next, he seemed paralyzed by simple scenarios. It came when he accidently spilled a glass of milk and stood motionless above the puddle watching it spread. It also came in more serious situations, like when a vicious neighborhood dog lunged out toward Arjun. He didn’t react as the dog snapped at the end of its leash, an inch away from Arjun’s face. Ellie grabbed his shirt and hauled him back. The near-miss gave me a flashback to Arjun standing as if frozen by his little bike, his resolute face masking any emotion after crashing into the hedge.

As Arjun’s English improved, so did his storytelling, which took on such elaborate fantasy that it was difficult to distinguish fact from fiction or figure out where the tales began or ended. He still had vivid recollections of Nepal, but they were mixed up with his new life. We were at a neighbor’s house having dinner one night, and they had ordered lobsters from Maine. When they showed Arjun the lobsters crawling around, Arjun said in a direct deadpan voice, “Oh yeah. I ate lobsters all the time in Nepal.”

We all laughed.

“Yeah, they catch them right out of the Kathmandu River,” I added.

“What else did you have in Nepal?” our neighbor asked.

“Many things,” Arjun replied. “We had sharks too. I fight one off once.” Then he swung his fists to reenact the battle.

That night, we were lying down together reading a book before bed, and I said, “Tell me about the orphanage. What was it like?”

“It was loud and cold, and I was hungry all the time,” he answered.

“That must have been hard,” I replied.

“I was in a room with many boys,” he said. “I had two other boys in my bed.”

“What were their names?” Ellie asked, but he didn’t know.

“But they were loud, and they kept me wake,” he revealed. “They elbow me, and snore, and they fart a lot.” With that, he let out a laugh.

We laughed with him.

“I would tell them, ‘Shut up!’”

And we laughed even harder.

“Then I turn into superhero,” he continued. “And I fly up over Nepal, and I fly all around Kathmandu and get away.” As we thought about him crammed into a small bed with two other smelly boys, it made sense. You blur the line between reality and imagination as an instrument of survival. I suppose that’s what he had to do to simultaneously remember and forget.

It had to be confusing for him, all the old memories and new ones, bleeding together as he tried to make sense of the jumbled images and recollections.

“Do you have memories of your family?” Ellie asked. “You told me once that your Nepali mom was beautiful and tall with long dark hair.”

“Yes,” he said. “I can remember her face.”

“Do you know where she is?” Ellie asked. We were always careful with this line of questioning. Unless he was ready, it wasn’t smart to pry about his past.

Arjun answered with the same word he’d used months before. “Jaya,” and again, Ellie asked him to repeat it. This time, the word began to form more clearly.

I whispered to Ellie, “I think he may be saying jail.”

* * *

Emma had been very patient with Arjun his first six months, but he tested that patience daily. In the orphanage, he had competed for everything, without enough resources to go around, so now, he was suspicious of Emma getting more food, more attention, more love. His appetite for all three of these things was insatiable. When eating, he would scope out her plate to see if it was piled a little higher. When Ellie poured milk, he’d carefully examine the two glasses side by side. He was so obsessed, Ellie eventually broke down and started pouring the milk and telling Arjun to choose whichever glass he wanted.

So a little sibling rivalry started. We had just moved the kids downstairs into their own rooms with separate bathrooms. One morning we heard Emma yelling from her shower.

“The water!” she screamed. “It’s going from scalding hot to freezing cold!”

After this went on for a few more mornings, Ellie got suspicious and tiptoed down to the other bathroom. She peeked in on Arjun, who was standing in his own shower, gleefully turning the knob from cold to hot and back again. He’d figured out if he spun the knob back and forth super fast, it would affect Emma’s shower temperatures as well. There he was, behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, making Emma squeal by alternately burning and freezing her. It was like the spirit of Mark Weihenmayer had come back to wreak chaos upon our family. Although Arjun tried to deny it, he had been caught in the act of sabotage.

During our first summer, Sabriye and Paul came to visit. They were traveling around the States, and we invited them to come stay with us. I was so happy to reunite with them after our experience together in Tibet, and I was excited to welcome them into our family.

When they arrived, they gave the kids each a toy yak, covered in actual fluffy yak hair. The next morning the kids retrieved the yaks from their rooms and showed us. Immediately, we noticed Arjun’s was already broken; its head bobbled and was about to fall off. Ellie and I felt terrible, because the kids had just received the gifts. So many of Arjun’s toys ended up maimed in some way or another. We immediately cornered Arjun, holding the yak out in front of him.

“How did this happen? You just got this.”

“Emma broke!” he yelled back.

I called Emma over and said, “Emma, he’s saying you broke his yak.”

“Dad, what are you talking about? Who is the liar in the family? Arjun is always the one lying. I don’t lie. You know me.”

Now pretty frustrated, I said, “Okay, Arjun, quit lying. You’re going to be in big trouble.”

“Not my yak!” he yelled in an angry, defiant voice. “Emma’s yak!”

I just shook my head. “I can’t believe you’re just standing there lying to my face.”

Later that evening we were having a glass of wine with Sabriye and Paul, and Paul said, “I wanted to let you know that during our travels, one of the little toy yaks we brought was damaged in the baggage. I know that Arjun is new to the family, and younger, so we decided to give Emma the damaged one; we thought it wouldn’t bother her.”

I couldn’t believe it. She’d gone into his room and swapped them out. Good little Miss Emma had pulled the old yak switcheroo on Arjun.

We went into her room, holding the nearly headless yak. “Emma, you’re lying to us.”

She just broke down in tears. She’d been an only child for almost seven years, and now there was this new kid getting everything, even the milk glass. She’d been so kind and generous, sharing her room, and she was being rewarded with scalding showers. She was over it. “I really wanted the good yak!” she cried.

I held her, and when her sobs subsided to a sniffle, she said imploringly, in her sweetest voice, “Dad?” She started hemming and hawing.

“What is it, girl?”

“I was wondering … is there any way that maybe … when you adopt a kid and maybe it doesn’t … I dunno, work out … is there a way to make it … not happen? Like, is there a way to make things go back to before, when Arjun wasn’t here?”

“No, angel,” I said, holding her close. “I know it’s sometimes hard, but there’s no return policy. There’s no going back. This is forever.”