This pepper has no sense of humour. It cannot be charmed, pleaded or negotiated with. If you were to meet it in a dark alleyway it would not be satisfied with the contents of your wallet, your watch, your wedding ring, your electronic gadgets, because it wants to Fuck You Up.

The “Ghost Pepper” as it is also known, was born in violence, and violence is all that it understands. It cannot be happy unless you are not. It will burn off your lips, your tongue, your throat, reduce you to a sputtering remnant of the man you once were.

This little wrinkly red motherfucker is the vegetal embodiment of detached sadism. If Naga Jolokia were a man, it would be an eight foot tall Nazi. If it were an animal it would be a shark on amphetamines.  If it were a car, it would be a tank. If it had been a fruit, it would be an apple driving a bulldozer through your face just because you were in the way and then backing up to mash up the rubble that was your skull for shits and giggles.

I decided to make chili powder out it, toasting this dried, seeded, and stemmed menace on low heat with a pinch of whole cumin seed, and inadvertently transformed my apartment into a failed weaponized gas laboratory. The air was filled with burns. I couldn’t tell if I had been tear gassed at a protest and hallucinated this dangerous brush with domesticity, or if a malign ghost had taken up residence in my apartment, its suitcases packed with nothing but hatred for the living and evil intents.

-Written in my washroom where I cower in between the ventilator and an open window, trying to breathe but not quite succeeding.