In the fall of 2006, I found myself bouncing down the narrow streets of Kathmandu in a taxi. Outside the window, acrid fumes of burning trash seared my eyes and nose. Throngs of kids clamored and laughed as they chased our vehicle, and packs of dogs snarled and barked. The engine revved and the car shot forward, then lurched to a stop. My head swung forward as the driver laid on the horn. I felt small hands protrude through the open window and poke my shoulder. “Namaste. Namaste. You buy, mister.”
The little hands retreated instantly as the driver shot forward, yanked hard left, whipped hard right, and accelerated again, tires squealing. The voice of a high-pitched woman warbled Bollywood-style on the radio in rhythm with the start and stop of the car, and the bumpy road thumped like a drum. Kami Tenzing Sherpa, the sirdar (manager) from my Mount Everest and Tibet expeditions, sat in the front passenger seat. Next to me, in the backseat, was my good friend Rob Raker. I was charged up with anticipation. “Maybe I’ll change his name to Kami,” I said. Kami laughed.
“I hope this all works out,” I said. “I’m a little nervous.”
“This is a big day for you,” Rob said.
We were minutes away from the Helpless Children Protection Home in Kathmandu where I was about to meet Arjun. I repeated the words in my head, “My son … This is my son … I have a son…” It didn’t seem real.
* * *
A week earlier, Nina, the head of our adoption agency, had gone over to Nepal to try to set up more adoptions and to establish more in-country partners who could help her. While there, she’d stopped in at the Helpless Children Protection Home to visit four-year-old Arjun. Ellie excitedly read me her e-mail from Kathmandu, fresh after her visit.
Dear Erik, Ellie, and Emma,
Arjun appears healthy. He was shy with me at first but slowly warmed up as we explored the gifts you sent. He seemed very curious. When we looked at the little book together, he touched the English script and kept running his hands over it. The director told him “that is English words.” He said, “English is pretty.”
He especially liked the two stuffed animals. He examined them carefully. He understood that I don’t speak Nepali and tried to communicate with me through miming. He touched the eyes of the stuffed animal, then touched his eyes and then mine and said the Nepali word for eye, “kaan,” like he was trying to teach me and also show me that he recognized that the toy had eyes.
I got a good smile out of him when I made the toys sniff him and check him out. Then he took over playing, making them dance and talk. But he really showed he is all boy when he made one of the animals sniff the butt of the other, then had the animal pretend to pass out in disgust.
When the orphanage director was sending him back out to play, she tried to convince him to store the stuffed animals in the gift bag so they would stay clean. Arjun wheeled off a big string of emphatic words in Nepali, which made her laugh out loud, and then she sent him out with the toys. When she stopped laughing, she translated what he said as, “You told me that my new mother sent these toys. I think she wants ME to have them. They belong to me, so I can decide if they get dirty or stay clean, and I have decided to keep them with me.”
The director said, ‘There is no sense arguing with him. He will persist until you give in. He is not going to scream or be loud. He just will do and do and do or say and say and say until he has what he wants. He never gives up!’
So in conclusion, sounds like he’ll fit right in as a Weihenmayer.
P.S. Don’t think you can count on Emma having a little servant—he knows his mind too well!
* * *
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he was the reincarnation of Mark.” I laughed and continued packing. This would be my second trip, I thought, that began with a letter. Nepalese adoption regulations required two separate visits, the first to meet the child and officially agree, and the second to complete a slew of paperwork and medical records. I also had a secondary purpose, to climb one of the hidden gems of the Himalayas, and I’d asked my climbing partner, Rob, to join me. Rob was an expert ice climber and alpinist.
When our taxi pulled up to the orphanage and we got out, more kids surrounded us, calling out, “Namaste,” in singsong voices, and they escorted us into the home. Just like at Sabriye’s school, Braille Without Borders in Tibet, I could hear that I was in a noisy courtyard full of kids. Children were shouting and kicking balls around. There was the sound of construction somewhere in the distance, and more yipping dogs. I could hear a Ping-Pong ball bouncing back and forth. I reached out and touched the table. It was made of concrete, with bricks lined across the center serving as a net.
The procession of kids ushered us inside. More children’s voices echoed throughout what sounded like a large bare room. The escort then led us into an office, and Sabitri, the director, said, “Namaste,” and presented us with ceremonial scarves called khatas. In return, I gave her a gift, also a scarf, from Colorado. “From my family,” I said. “I like your home—lots of noise, lots of laughter.”
“Big E, you’ve got someone standing a couple of feet in front of you,” Rob said.
Sabitri spoke in Nepali, and I heard tiny feet and pants shuffling closer, yet not speaking.
“He’s shy,” I said to the room.
Kami then spoke to him, and he inched even closer. I knelt down and could hear his soft breathing just a foot away. I could sense he was staring at me. I reached out tentatively and felt his short cropped hair and stroked his shoulder. He was wearing the same puffy jacket as in the first photo Ellie had described to me.
“He’s a little guy,” I said.
“He’s a lucky guy,” Kami added.
“And I’m a lucky dad,” I replied.
Then I handed Arjun my long white cane. He took it and handed it back. I had just bought a new cane for the trip. It was a new kind: Instead of folding like most canes, this one telescoped down, so you could place it in a bag. I pushed down on the top, and the cane began collapsing and didn’t stop until it was less than a foot long.
“He likes that,” Rob said.
I handed the cane back, and Arjun carefully extended it again to full height, which was more than twice as tall as he was. Then he tried to shrink it, but couldn’t reach the top. I helped, and it disappeared again.
“It’s magic,” I said.
Then I pushed my talking watch, and it spoke the time.
“Another big smile,” Rob called.
Arjun sat down on the couch next to me and spent the next five minutes pushing all the buttons on the watch, hearing the time, the date, the year. Then I let him hear the list of menu options for the alarm. Little tunes like “London Bridge Is Falling Down” played. Arjun pushed through the menu, and when he got to the last option, it was a rooster crowing, and I heard him giggle for the first time.
Sitting on the couch in the orphanage, I pulled out the treasures Ellie and Emma had tucked away in my suitcase. I showed him the photo gallery Ellie and Emma had made of our family. I’d memorized the order of the photos.
“That’s Emma, your big sister, Didi,” I said, “and that’s Willa, our dog, kukur. That’s your mama, Ama. Romro cha—good boy,” I said, and I realized I’d just exhausted most of the Nepali words I knew. I then reached into my backpack and handed him a sweatshirt that said COLORADO, then a coloring book, a big carton of crayons, and a little penguin with a yellow nose. He poured the crayons out on the couch, picked them up, and clutched them in his hands. “You color with them,” I said, taking one and pretending to color the book. But Arjun had another idea. He began to color over the penguin’s nose. That got the second laugh of the day.
“His nose is turning green,” Rob said.
Then Arjun shifted gears.
“This is very interesting,” Rob narrated. “He’s organizing his crayons according to their colors … Now he’s placing them one by one back in the box. The tips are all pointing up, and he’s being very meticulous.”
“Maybe he’ll take after you, Rob,” I said.
As I sat with Arjun next to me, I thought how miraculous it was that I was even here. It wasn’t legal for Americans to deal directly with foreign orphanages, so after careful research, Ellie had chosen a well-reviewed adoption agency out of Boulder, just twenty miles north of Golden. They would act as our liaison for the tricky process ahead. In our first meeting, we’d inquired about Nepal, and Nina, the head of the agency, had cautioned us against it. “It’s almost impossible,” she’d told us. “If I were you, I’d give up that idea.”
We learned the restrictions were vast and seemed senseless from a Western point of view. For instance, regulations stated that prospective parents couldn’t adopt siblings of the same gender; if you already had a girl, then you couldn’t adopt another girl; if you had a boy, you couldn’t adopt another boy; if you already had two children, then you no longer qualified—no exceptions. The policy didn’t offer an explanation either, but I thought it had something to do with the fact that one boy and one girl met the definition of a perfect Hindu family.
We had written Kami about our desire, and he’d soon written back, telling us he’d found a little girl in a small Sherpa village whose parents were so impoverished, they welcomed their child being given to a well-off American family. He wrote, “Though it is hard for any parents to give their child away, still they are very much concerned about her future! So, they feel very happy and lucky about having you to adopt their daughter! She is very healthy! And she had indeed all the vaccinations which any child is supposed to have!” Kami added that there were ways around all the regulations too; Nepal was one of those places where you could circumvent the law with the right connections and enough money. But after reading his note, Ellie and I both knew, immediately, we couldn’t proceed. It sounded too much like adopting a puppy at the kennel. We couldn’t take a child away from her parents, even with all the right vaccinations. We instead sent Kami a check so the family could stay together.
In order to shift our desire from Nepal, the agency showed us pictures and descriptions of children from countries like Guatemala that produced over four thousand adoptions a year. However, Nepal had remained our top choice. I had grown to love this country and felt a deep connection. The mountains and people had helped to transform my life. I thought about the Sherpas who had risen above their superstitions about blindness and supported our climb to the top of the world. I remembered kneeling at the South Summit of Everest at over twenty-eight thousand feet and asking Ang Pasang to read the dial on my oxygen mask.
“It’s good,” he assured me.
“Is the weather holding out?” I asked, waving up at the sky.
“It’s good,” he repeated.
“So we have enough time,” I asked, “to cross the knife-edge ridge up the Hillary Step to the summit, and back again?”
“It’s good. We go up,” he urged. And even at extreme altitude with barely enough oxygen to function, it occurred to me what a remarkable statement this was. Ang Pasang had been up Mount Everest twice before, and he knew the Sherpa code well. Up higher, if I fell down in the snow and couldn’t get back up, his options were severely limited. He’d most likely die in an effort to drag me down the mountain. I knew Ang Pasang had a wife and two young children, so his simple statement had just linked his fate to mine, to that of a blind man. It was one of the most profound offerings of trust and belief I’d ever experienced. Nepal had plenty of problems: pollution, overcrowding, corruption, and desperate poverty. But I loved this country, not for its shortfalls, but for its aspirations, its hopefulness. It made me feel more optimistic about the world and the future, that humanity had the potential to elevate itself, to become the best version of itself.
So sitting in Nina’s office, leafing through adoption brochures from Guatemala, I leaned back in my chair and thought hard. “I think we’ll stick to Nepal,” I said.
Judging by all the children in Emma’s first-grade class, from Korea to China to Vietnam, international adoption seemed like a common practice, but with the endless paperwork required, we couldn’t believe how anyone got to the finish line. It included multiple visits from social workers, bank statements, U.S. federal tax returns listing net worth, autobiographical summaries, police clearances, physical and mental health letters from doctors, fingerprints for the Colorado Bureau of Investigations and the FBI, proof of health insurance forms, original copies of marriage and birth certificates, copies of passports, a current vaccination report for our dog and cat, five letters of recommendations, commitment statements, motivational statements, adoption guarantee letter, list of properties statement, ten passport-size photographs of each parent, and two sets of ten photos taken of our house, including bedrooms, yard, and kitchen. As careful as we were, Ellie was constantly discovering outdated notary stamps, stamps pressed upside down, or seals not raised enough. If everything wasn’t completed with 100 percent accuracy, two all-important forms would be denied: the Central Registry Form sent to the State of Colorado Department of Human Services and, the granddaddy of them all, the USCIS I-600: Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition.
Almost a year into the adoption process, all this work hadn’t gotten us anywhere. Emma’s T-shirt imprinted with the words BIG SISTER didn’t even fit her anymore.
In the fall of 2006, Nepal was reeling with internal unrest. The Maoist civil war, simmering for the last ten years, mostly throughout the rural areas of Nepal, had now spilled into the streets of Kathmandu. The country was paralyzed by massive strikes. The protesters were attempting to force the monarchy to reinstate the parliament and instill democracy. In November, there was a breakthrough when the government signed a peace accord with the Maoists, curtailing the power of the monarchy and ending the long insurgency.
I had previously felt this conflict firsthand, when it exploded on the heels of my Mount Everest expedition in 2001. Sitting at thirteen thousand feet at the airstrip in Syangboche, Kami and the other Sherpas had begun wailing. They had just heard over their shortwave radio that ten members of the Nepali royal family had been assassinated. The prince had walked into dinner, pulled out an arsenal of guns, and shot everyone at the table. He’d then killed himself. The king’s brother, not in the room at the time, was to be ordained as the new king. He was a hated figure and suspected to be behind the murders. He was a strict monarchist, and it was predicted his first act as king would be to suspend parliament and roll back hard-earned reforms. So we sat on the airstrip drinking a homemade rice wine called chang from old fuel containers while the Sherpas mourned and talked about the future of Nepal, which was now in jeopardy.
We had finally flown Russian helicopters into an abandoned Kathmandu airport. Our taxi couldn’t get us very far through the city, so we had walked through the main part of town toward our hotel. A cacophony of sirens, loudspeakers, and angry chanting assaulted my ears as thousands of people rioted around us. Police behind barricades pointed AK-47s at the crowd. People were burning everything they could get their hands on, including vehicles. We were choking on the smoke. I was walking with Charley Mace from my team when his hand suddenly shoved me down so hard, I almost dropped to my knees, and a flaming brick soared just over my head. How ironic, I thought, to survive the Khumbu Icefall only to die on the streets of Kathmandu.
Our hotel was under curfew the rest of our time there. Nepali TV aired the funerals, a procession of bodies being paraded through the streets on a national day of mourning. We were all relieved when our flight finally took off, lifting up out of a cloud of chaos.
So now a period of tranquility contributed to our adoption agency feeling comfortable enough to establish contact with some key partners on the ground in Kathmandu. One of these was the Helpless Children Protection Home. The agency even hired a local liaison to start laying all the groundwork.
“We still don’t recommend this,” Nina said. “It’s going to be a roller-coaster ride, but you’ve talked about Nepal so much, and the door is now open.”
We had told Nina we were looking for a little boy, closer to Emma’s age, perhaps four or five. Most people were looking to adopt babies, so once a child was out of diapers, his chances of being adopted dropped dramatically. The agency had followed with a photo. It was in low resolution, taken on a cheap phone. Ellie had stared at it for a long time, and she was immediately drawn to the boy inside. There was no test or a trial period to ensure the child would fit into your family. There was not a stack of pictures to choose from. It was just one grainy photo of a dirty-faced, barefoot little boy not quite staring at the camera. He was wearing baggy pants that were way too big for him and a pumpkin-colored puffy jacket. He looked like one of the pickpocket children in Oliver Twist. But Ellie knew, almost instantaneously, she was looking at her son. She had fallen in love. Then she described it to me, and as if through osmosis, I fell in love too. Most decisions are best made logically, with hours of careful deliberation, but this one was the opposite. It was like plucking up a grain of sand on a wide beach, or picking a star in the vast universe, and deciding, on the spot, it was the right one.
“How will he feel,” Ellie asked, “when he learns someday he was chosen based on a photo?”
“I guess the same as Emma will feel,” I answered, “when she learns someday she’s the result of a million sperm racing toward an egg. If another sperm had won out, she wouldn’t be here either. There’s a randomness to everything in life.”
“Maybe it’s not random,” Ellie countered.
After that, there was no other direction, no other option. I was on the phone booking a flight to Kathmandu, while Ellie was driving up the highway toward the agency to sign the next set of papers. On the way, she was pulled over for speeding. How could she explain to the officer that she was in such a hurry because we were having a baby? Later that day, Ellie said, “I feel guilty about not going with you for this first visit, but Emma’s big art project is due, and her winter pageant is coming up. She’s been practicing for a month and her class is counting on her. Besides, this has already been a test of resiliency, and my heart is already aching. So if it falls through, if it doesn’t happen, I think you may be able to confront it better.”
Our next days in Nepal were busy. Kami, Rob, and I needed to run around to complete all the initial paperwork. It was a tangled process. Apparently, the intent to adopt needed to be signed by a panel of governmental bureaucrats comprised of different ministries like the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare, the Children’s Federation, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We met with a procession of officials who assessed all our paperwork. We had to now wait for the files to be sent to another ministry and finally on to one more legal department before the orphanage would be notified that the adoption process was official. Since we had a few days to wait, Sabitri said it would be okay for us to visit Arjun at his school.
When we walked into his classroom, Rob described Arjun looking a little sheepish, hunched down in the back row in his navy-blue uniform. When he saw us, he hunkered down even farther—most likely embarrassed by the two “long noses,” one with a camera around his neck and the other with a white stick, standing at the doorway smiling and waving. Typical Nepali schools were much about memorization and had a strict code of discipline. Incorrect answers often received a whack on the back of your hand with a ruler.
When we introduced ourselves, the entire class responded in unison, “Hello, sir. How are you, sir?”
“We’re doing great,” Rob said back. “How about you all?”
“Thank you, sir. We are fine, sir.”
“So what are you learning today?” I asked.
In unison, they responded, “Hello, sir. How are you, sir?”
“I’m good,” I said.
“Thank you, sir. We are fine, sir.”
“Do you like school?” I tried again.
In unison again, “Hello, sir. How are you, sir?”
Rob and I chuckled and excused ourselves, saying good-bye as we departed.
As the door swung shut behind us, we heard their faint voices chiming still, “Thank you, sir. We are fine, sir…”
Sabitri also gave the okay for Arjun to spend the days at our hotel. So despite it not being official yet, and the fact Arjun didn’t speak any English, Sabitri dropped him off the next morning and waved good-bye, saying, “Be back at 6:00 P.M.!”
Kathmandu didn’t have much open space, but one of the old-English-style hotels, Hotel Yak & Yeti, had a beautiful quiet backyard with gardens, pruned hedgerows, statues, and fountains. So we decided to head there with Arjun for the day.
We started with an early lunch. On our first day at the orphanage, we’d witnessed the lunch routine. Each child was handed a small tin bowl filled with rice and lentils. There were no tables or silverware. Instead the kids sat on the ground in the courtyard scooping up food with their hands. So when Rob, Arjun, and I sat down at an outside table, I said, “What do ya say we fatten this guy up?”
“You know me, Big E,” Rob said excitedly. “I never turn down food.”
“And he might as well get used to American food,” I added as I ordered Arjun a pizza and french fries and Rob and me club sandwiches. While we waited, Arjun sat swallowed up by his chair, his feet dangling. He beat on the table with his fork and spoon. At the next table over sat a young European couple with a little Nepali girl. Rob said quietly, “Guess you’re not the only one adopting around here.”
Rob made eye contact, and the mom approached our table to introduce herself.
“We’re adopting as well. How wonderful you two are adding to your family!”
My face creased into an awkward grin, and Rob said sheepishly, “Actually, I’m just helping with Erik’s family.” And then he said a little more softly, “He has a wife back in Colorado.”
“Oh. Well,” she continued, “I hope it all goes smoothly.”
“So far so good,” I said as Arjun sat sawing at the table with his steak knife.
As she turned back toward her table, Rob added, “His wife is coming on the next trip. I’m actually married too.”
When the food arrived, Arjun devoured his pizza and fries astonishingly fast. My belly was a little upset, a feeling you came to expect in Nepal. The typical joke was:
“How was your meal?”
“Don’t know yet. Tell you in six hours.”
So the second half of my sandwich still sat on my plate. Arjun dropped off his chair, climbed onto my lap, and began eating the other half. I felt a little guilty, because I knew this was probably Arjun’s first taste of meat. I recalled the police report, which stated that he was found on the street crying, so malnourished he couldn’t walk. The orphanage had nursed him back to health on an all-vegetable Hindu diet.
After finishing the rest of my plate, Arjun moved around the table and polished off a chunk of bread still left on Rob’s plate. Then he saw a dish full of ketchup that the waiter had brought for the fries. He grabbed it and began drinking it down.
“Whoa,” Rob said, pulling him back. “That’s going to make you sick.”
Apparently, Arjun got the message not to guzzle the ketchup, so like I’d seen before at the orphanage, he switched gears and began pouring water, then Fanta, and then salt and pepper into the ketchup dish and mixing it all together in a potion. As he mixed, he chattered energetically to himself.
“He’s a mad scientist,” Rob said, chuckling.
After lunch, I took Arjun’s hand, and we walked through the hotel grounds. We dipped our hands in the fountains and felt the two stone lions that guarded the entrance to the garden. Then I put Arjun on my shoulders. He seemed to like it as I began veering around pretending to careen into trees and bushes.
“I’m a crazy taxi driver,” I said, swaying from side to side. Arjun began squealing and howling with laughter. Then I spun a 360, and he squealed more, shouting out in Nepali words I thought meant, “More! Again!” I was about to do it even faster when a waiter rushing by with a tray called out, “He is saying stop.”
“I’ve gotta learn Nepali,” I said. “He almost threw up on my head.”
During our walk, Rob found a Nerf ball and handed it to Arjun, who immediately proceeded to reach into his deep pocket, find the fork he apparently saved from lunch, and jab it into the ball and laugh.
“No, no,” I said, pulling the fork from his hand.
Changing tack again, Rob said, “How about a game of catch?”
He backed away and threw Arjun the ball. Arjun chased after it like a puppy and stood contentedly with the ball in his mouth.
“Throw it back now.” Rob clapped his hands, and Arjun chucked the ball.
“Wow. He’s got quite an arm on him,” Rob said. “Now let’s test your soccer skills.” He kicked Arjun the ball. Arjun adeptly kicked it right back. “Wow, he’s got great coordination.”
Then Arjun dropped to his knees and began batting the ball back with his hands.
“Now he’s a goalie,” Rob called out.
On the next kick, Arjun picked up the ball with one hand, and with the other, he reached into a nearby planter. Suddenly, he came up with a pinecone and hurled it at Rob.
Laughing, Rob called out to me, “Whoa! He just whipped a pinecone right by my head.”
Arjun reached into the planter, and more pinecones flew toward Rob as he laughed mischievously.
“Sneaky little guy,” I said. “I think the shy boy from the orphanage has been replaced.”
“Maybe we should try another game,” Rob said as pinecones whizzed by his head and Arjun continue to call out, “Ball … ball.”
We took a break and sat at our table, figuring out what to do next. Arjun took the lead and came up with the next game. He grabbed a two-liter water bottle, flattened one side on the table, and began to swing it.
“He’s making a bat,” Rob said excitedly.
“Makes sense,” I replied. “Where does an orphan get a bat in Nepal, so you get innovative and make one out of a plastic bottle.”
Rob ran out onto the lawn and pitched Arjun the ball. The bottle crunched as Arjun whacked the ball thirty feet past his head. “Nice line drive,” Rob said, and with the next, “Home run. Out of the park.”
Whether with two arms in baseball style or creating his own one arm cricket style, Arjun was batting nearly a thousand. “You’ve got quite an athlete here,” Rob called as Arjun slapped his hand against the bottle, eager for the next pitch.
That afternoon, Arjun and I headed up to my room for a rest. As soon as he entered, he spotted something that grabbed his attention. I listened as he paced around, attempting to surmount some kind of challenge. Then he used a chair to climb up onto the desk and leap across to the dresser. From there, he monkeyed his way up the large TV. Then I understood. He was going for the basket of fruit placed at the top. He was so tiny. It was like King Kong climbing the Empire State Building. Retrieving the basket, he amazingly shimmied back down, jumped off the desk, and sat on the bed, eating every piece of fruit, from bananas and oranges to mango and half a pineapple. I wondered when I should make him stop. Maybe he was like one of those dogs that didn’t know to stop eating and would fill its belly until it literally exploded. I took the fruit basket away and put it back on the TV. As he finished off his last banana, he grabbed the remote control off the side table and, as natural as can be, clicked on the tube and began flipping through the channels until he got to a Power Rangers cartoon. How the heck, I wondered, did he know how to use a remote? The orphanage did have one small TV, but it was shared between fifty kids, so it wasn’t like he was getting a lot of practice. Maybe it was programmed into the DNA of children everywhere. I laughed.
After an hour, Arjun slid off the bed and walked around the room, clearly restless. I had a suspicion what the problem was and showed him into the bathroom. I was right. He climbed up on the toilet, but instead of sitting down, he stood up on the seat. I realized he’d never sat on a toilet before and was used to doing his business Nepali style, which was to squat over a hole between two-foot platforms. He didn’t know what to do with the toilet paper I kept handing him either. Despite my effort to teach him, even performing a little skit of wiping my backside, he just stood holding the clump of toilet paper. Again, I realized Nepali style was to use your left hand to wipe and then wash in a small bowl of water. That’s the last time I’ll shake a Nepali left-handed, I thought. After a few more awkward minutes, I knew this was my first big test of fatherhood. So I fortified my resolve, took the paper out of his hand, and rolled up my sleeves.
“Here’s to many big adventures,” I said as I dove in.
* * *
On our last day in Kathmandu, we went on a tour of the city. I bought Arjun a new set of clothes to replace his shabby ones. His favorite was a sweatshirt that he immediately put on and proudly wore the rest of the day. It was emblazoned with the words POWER RANGERS.
Next, we visited the Boudhanath Monastery, a sacred destination for Buddhist pilgrims. In the ’50s, many refugees had escaped over the mountains from Tibet and had settled around Boudhanath, which was now a center of Tibetan culture. People were telling me that judging by Arjun’s facial features, he was possibly Tamang, one of the tribes that had descended from Tibet. So as we followed the throngs of worshipers circumnavigating the stupa, Arjun must have fit right in. However, the tall white guy holding his hand and tapping a long white cane in front of him probably drew some attention. To our right, I could hear and sense the temple, 120 feet tall and surrounded by a sixteen-sided wall, with paintings in the niches. The base of the stupa symbolized Earth. The next section narrowed to a tower, capped with a gilded canopy representing air. The final piece was an even narrower spire, symbolizing ether. The whole temple was meant to represent man’s ascension toward enlightenment.
As we walked, Arjun had more earthly problems. By his pull on my hand, I suspected something was urgent, and I figured he had to pee. Rob had raced ahead snapping photos, so it was left to me to find a bathroom. Public restrooms were nonexistent in Kathmandu. I couldn’t speak much Nepalese and couldn’t make eye contact with the passing crowd. I was at a loss.
Finally, in desperation, I awkwardly interrupted a group of women speaking in Nepalese. “Bathroom?” I asked, and I pointed to Arjun who was now squirming and holding his crotch. One of the ladies said something I couldn’t understand. I stood confused as she kept talking. Finally, she grabbed my hand and pulled me ten feet over to the left. My foot stumbled over a foot-wide gutter in the pathway. Then it dawned on me what she’d been trying to tell me. She’d probably been pointing too. Arjun unbuttoned his fly and began peeing right there in the gutter, and I assumed it was common practice for children.
Crisis averted, we resumed our stroll, but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the reasons I shouldn’t be adopting this little boy. Emma had been challenging enough to raise, but she had pretty much followed the rules. This guy was already turning out to be even more active and demanding. I hadn’t even been able to find a place for him to pee. So how would I teach him to ride a bike or to read? I couldn’t play a game of catch with him or shoot hoops with him. I couldn’t teach him to drive his first car. The list kept compounding in my mind. Far above, I could hear the prayer flags draped over the temple, flapping in the wind, bearing prayers toward the heavens. So I put in my own silent prayer.
“Please,” I whispered, “let me be a good father to this little boy.”
As hard as I listened, there was no answer from Buddha or from God, but the flags fluttering in the breeze and the ravens squawking from the trees sounded a little like Mark laughing. “What the hell?” he said, amused. “You gonna puss out? You got this, bro. I taught you everything I know. Now suck it up.”
That night, Rob, Arjun, and I had pizza together, and on the taxi ride back to the orphanage, Arjun must have been amped up on carbohydrates, because he raced back and forth over our laps trying to look out the windows. On his next lap, I grabbed him and tried to wrestle him into his seat belt, but it was obvious he’d seldom been pinned down. I finally got him sandwiched between Rob and me with the belt buckled around him, and soon, his small frame went limp. He tipped over and fell asleep with his head on my lap. I stroked his short hair, his full cheeks, and his tiny round nose, just the opposite of my long prominent one. He was a boy I barely knew. There were wide expanses separating us. We didn’t look alike or speak the same language. I didn’t know many of the facts that comprised his life. Yet this boy softly snoring on my lap was my son.