You're having dinner at a nice little restaurant, vapors rising from the iced bottle of beer mixed with the aroma of the spices that soak the seafood laid out in front of you stroke the flushed skin of your cheeks. The breeze of a distant fan intermittently struggles to divert the course of the beads of sweat that are gliding down your brow. It's stifling hot. The heat of a season that will end soon, swept away by the violence of the monsoons, but you've learned to fend those heat waves off and keep them out of the peaceful and cool cocoon where you like to hide yourself away. Maybe it's your ancestral spirit of adaptation, or maybe some of the nirvanic skills of the Buddhist monks have been finally absorbed by an unidentified spiritual element hidden somewhere inside of you. You might even be able to enjoy the moment. Because it is supposed to be a nice, enjoyable moment. You might, as I said, if it wasn't for the vibrations of an electric guitar and the catlike yelling of a singer hitting your eardrums pointblank. You realize that this place is really changing you when you notice that instead of cursing and insulting them you are actually singing the refrain between a mouthful and the next one, while your right sole keeps the rhythm under the table, chasing away a cockroach or a rat that had come to feast on the leftovers.
