I might be Indian myself, but I’m no expert on the typical Indian woman. I don’t enjoy strong curry, I can’t roll a roti, I have short hair (horror)! I didn’t even know (gulp) what an IPL was until someone took pity and told me.

Hello, my name is Sana, and I’m a freelance journalist.

And if that opening sounds like I’m at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, that was deliberate. Because being freelance is a kind of addiction.

A twelve-year-old boy comes from a broken home. His father, with whom he enjoyed an especially close relationship, died two years ago. His mother remarried soon after that but he could never achieve with his stepfather, the easy rapport he had with his biological dad. Distressed by the lack of love and attention he received at home, he sought to replace it with a cocktail of violence, drugs and extortion and earn the fear, if not respect, of his peers.

Gangsters decapitate a young man in front of his mother, leaving the woman institutionalised. Stabbed fourteen times by thieves on his way to work, a middle-aged man dies while crawling to a surgery. His grandchildren later find his lifeless body in the street. Armed thugs gang rape a housewife and press a steaming iron to her face before making off with thousands of rands worth of appliances and furniture. These and other horror stories over the years, have left a gaping hole in the social fabric of the predominantly Indian community of Isipingo, in Durban’s troubled southern basin. Once an affluent area, the mass exodus of wealthy families to the Northern suburbs has seen Isipingo take a nosedive from its “Indian Beverley Hills” peak in the early nineties.