The story of Lal and his family, Indians, South Asians or desi’s whatever you identify with growing up in a township on the outskirts of Durban, both during and after apartheid. This provoking play reveals a heartfelt quest for truth, personifying parents who are impatient with their children and children who are ashamed of their parents; about the awkward transitions from childhood to adolescence and on to adulthood.

My name is Lal. I am a South African
or more precisely a South African Indian
or even more correctly, I am an African of Indian origin
or Indian of African origin,
post-colonial fifth generation son of a son of an indentured son.

If you want to complicate it further, I fall within the vague grouping of North Indian - whatever that means, I don' t know. But growing up in race conscious Durban, it seemed to mean a lot.

But it was only after I left South Africa, in frustration and anger, only after the death of my father, that I came to say with pride that I was 'an African, a South African ' in answer to the polite inquiries of my origins and the mispronunciations of my name.

Inanda, just outside of Durban, right by the Indian Ocean is where I grew up. My family had always lived there, since my great grandfather had convinced a white landowner to sell him a small acreage of land with a beautiful old house that had a wide veranda surrounding it on all sides. Over the decades, Indians had gravitated towards the area, I suppose because that ' s where Ghandi started his ' utopian ' farm. When I was born, in the early seventies, it seemed a peaceful and settled community where blacks and Indians lived together.
My father had brought my mother to the house when he was nineteen and she was seventeen and very pregnant with me. They lived there in a large and boisterous joint family - the many brothers and sisters and their wives and children, all crowded under one roof and headed by my Maji. It was a traditional Indian way of living but it became, during apartheid, a necessity. The family was a somewhat rough lot - working class, struggling hard to provide, with brothers brawling, with complicated and shifting alliance and always an underlying frustration for a country that was run on the notion that white is right.

My memories of that time hold bother bitter and sweet emotions for me. I longed to be part of a simpler nuclear family like everybody else, like on TV, but, on t he other hand, I relished the warm embrace of my grandmother and her wisdom, the many cousins, the domestic worker and even my aunts and uncles. I lived within it, but I could not see it then. It is only now in hindsight, now I am without then, that I hear their many voices: my father ' s stories, the bossy uncles, the gang of cousins, my mother and brother and, most strong of all, my grandmother, my Maji. I now know the strength it gave me - a knowledge of who I am and where I came from, a profound acceptance of my roots.

It now begins to heal me, it now begins ….

Rajesh Gopie has deeply sunk his roots into the theatre from an early age, I remember him and his early days when I was in school and was first exposed to his work when he performed at my school in Verulam. Till this day this man has exponentially expanded his creative quilt all over the world and has astounded audiences all over. Out of Bounds is his nirvana in my opinion and his work is a mirror of our identity as Indians of Africa. A true revelation of struggle, hope and passive defiance.