First Impressions: Eye-watering one for idiot list

All of us, whether we'll admit it or not, have an Idiot List - a greatest hits of utterly imbecilic decisions which have typically led to some deservedly painful situation.
Topping my own lengthy list is the instance that I lied to my girlfriend about having been to Australia (a harmless courtship fib that returned to haunt me); mistaking a moisturiser sample for complimentary sorbet in front of cricket great Chris Cairns; almost decapitating the family horse after lobbing a chlorine bomb into the wrong paddock; and waking up from a flu-induced stupor to find a dastardly off-peak Telecom cellphone contract signed and sitting on the coffee table.
On Saturday night came Number Five with a saffron-spiced bullet - my doltish request to sample what could be Tauranga's hottest curry dish.
It all started one night when Varinder Sharma, the charismatic owner of Bombay Brasserie, began telling me about the hottest curries his chefs could concoct without melting their ladles into a metallic syrup.
The restaurant, Varinder explained, has five grades of curry hotness - mild, medium, Kiwi hot, Indian hot and Super Duper Hot.
I considered the latter level and thought it a cartoonish, beguiling fraud.
What self-respecting curry merchant could possibly purport to boast a dish so hot that its title has to be punctuated with the words super and duper?
So on Saturday my girlfriend and two friends set about smashing the myth of Varinder's nuclear curry.
When we arrived I was half expecting him to cough up some legend about it being a recipe that originated in ancient Goa and wound up in a Tauranga kitchen after being handed down by generations of fearless tandoor spice mongers.
"The last time we tried to make the stuff we slightly miscalculated the chilli compound and my best chef blew both his hands off," I pictured him crowing.
Yet Varinder received our bold order of his volcanic rogan josh with nothing but stark, sober caution.
"I must warn you, this is very, very hot," Varinder advised, eyeing us like we were a bunch of na� children meddling with certain death.
The curry itself didn't appear all that daunting when he eventually placed it before our curious coupons in a small white bowl.
I'd steeled myself for a plate of steaming, spluttering, hellfire that looked like it had been scooped from the bowels of Mount Doom, but what we got appeared to be tepid, unthreatening chilli con carne.
We dipped our naan breads, exchanged a few daredevil glances, and detonated the incendiary curry upon our poor taste buds.
Okay, that's not too bad. Wait a minute. Oh no. It's getting ... no it can't get any ... oh my God. Oh no.
I scrunched my face, closed my eyes and suddenly heard Johnny Cash's baritone resounding in my brain: "I fell into a burnin' ring of fire ... I went down, down, down ... and the flames they went higher ..."
We grabbed at our wine glasses, chugged back untold jugs of water and stuffed our gobs with garlic naan, yet nothing could extinguish the terrible fires that had broken out inside our mouths.
"And it burns, burns, burns ... the ring of fire ... the ring of fire ..."
As if it wasn't bad enough, one of my companions then challenged me to a game of curry-chicken.
I recklessly accepted and we each dipped ourselves more dollops of rogan josh - which I've since learned loosely translates to "cooked in oil at intense heat".
But as I shoved my second lot of scalding rogan josh down my maw, my grinning companion fiendishly pulled away at the last second, giggled and called me "loser" as my eyes filled with blood and tears.
"Bound ... by wild desire ... I fell into a ring of fire ..."
As we later watched Varinder smear the fire-curry across his tongue to prove an old Indian notion about mind control, I realised that my self-inflicted suffering had easily qualified for my Idiot List.
Yes, I'd learned my lesson about messing around with chilli. And yes, I'd never take Varinder's warnings about his deadly rogan josh for granted again.