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depending on the day, a bunch of flowers or some pieces of fruit, which are offerings to the Buddha. Buddha doesn’t eat them, of course. It’s a Santa-and-the-milk-and-cookies kind of thing, without the presents or the ho, ho, ho. Although the Buddha definitely has that jolly fat man look about him.
    I sat down on the couch and waited for Nima to finish his call. He was speaking in Tibetan, but I was pretty sure he was talking to Pema, who was still living in India, because he barely said anything, and when he did talk, he kept being cut off mid-sentence. He didn’t get mad, though. It’s really hard to ruffle Nima. When he hung up, he smiled at me.
    “She have a hot temper,” he said. He’s secretly proud of that, I think, even though I’m under the impression that a hot temper is un-Buddhist.
    “What’s she mad about?”
    “Oh, I went to party at her cousin’s house in Brooklyn last week. Family party, such kind of thing. She heard I was flirting with her cousin.”
    “Were you?”
    “Actually, it’s possible.” He smiled. His left front tooth is covered with gold, which makes him look like a very good-natured pirate. You could see how he might flirt with some girl without really trying. He’s youngish, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two, something like that, and I bet girls would like him. He always looks like he’s about to wink at you, though I’ve never seen him actually wink.
    Nima made me some sweet tea and opened up a Tupperware container full of cold momos. Momos are Tibetan dumplings filled with meat and vegetables and garlic and other things. They are so good you could cry. Nima makes them by hand and sells them from a cart that he parks in front of the Museum of Natural History. We used to bump into each other in the elevator when I was walking Honey and he was coming back home from work. He was fascinated by the Crap Catcher and I was fascinated by the smell coming from his bag of leftover momos. It was a match made in heaven.
    Today, as always, he asked me how Nemesis was coming along. Fine, fine, still needs some work, I said. He didn’t know what Nemesis would do when it was finished. He once asked, back when I first met him.
    “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me,” I said.
    “Perhaps not,” he’d replied. That was that. He’d never asked again. But he liked hearing about it. He told me that when the Dalai Lama was a kid, he used to be able to fix movie projectors and clocks and cars and that if the Dalai Lama hadn’t been the Dalai Lama, he would have been an engineer. I guess that puts me in pretty good company.
    I didn’t tell Nima about the thing with Mr. Wooly. It was just too humiliating. I did tell him about the missing Oreo cookies and Mason, though.
    “You’ve got to see this kid. He’s pure evil,” I said.
    “Hmm.”
    “Oh no. Are you going to tell me something Buddhist?” I said warily.
    “You don’t want to hear?” he asked, smiling.
    “Not really. But go ahead.”
    “This boy, Mason, he is your enemy?”
    “Well, he’s stealing from me, so yeah, it’s safe to say he’s my enemy.”
    “Good,” Nima said.
    “How is that good?” I asked.
    “Because enemies are very helpful. Better in some way than friends. If you stay calm when your enemy harms you, you become much stronger-type person.”
    I must have looked unimpressed because he added, “Also, it is good for your karma. You do good thing, good thing happen for you. You do bad thing—” He shook his head gravely. Then he smiled. It’s hard for Nima to stay too serious.
    “Fine,” I said. “So I stay calm and think nice Buddhist thoughts about Mason. Then tomorrow he goes pawing through my lunch bag and takes my cookies again.”
    “Possibly you could leave a note,” Nima said.
    “A note?!” My voice grew shrill. “And what do you suggest I say?”
    “You could say, ‘Kindly not to take my cookies.’”
    “Ha!” Sometimes Nima was very unrealistic. I think it came from him always