Introduction

I begged and harassed my parents incessantly, knowing all too well that growing this plant from the nursery would prove to be a big challenge for me. I didn’t even like hot chillies at that point in my life, so my enthusiastic desire was a bit bizarre. The romantic notion of growing my peppers on our tiny windowsill in Bombay, India (even though the name of the city changed to Mumbai, it will forever remain Bombay to me), had fogged my mind with a cloud of desire. But experience should have taught me otherwise. I had already tried to grow wheat, chickpeas, and rice for my geography class and Christmas manger scenes. The plants grew at first but never lasted. Still, for a child barely into his teens, to see a dried seed transform and sprout into something alive and growing was fascinating.