Deb Chachra is one of the godparents of Border Town. More than one, we called her for advice on putting together activities or dealing with unexpected situations as the studio progressed. Here, she talks about Toronto, a border town 140km from the US boundary, but not for logistical reasons.

My hometown, Toronto, is 140 km from the nearest international border, but it’s a border city. Not one that lies between two contiguous geographical regions, but rather one that occupies the cultural space between all the different homelands of the people who live there, and the land of hockey and Tim Hortons and poutine.

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As of 2007, nearly half of Toronto residents were born outside Canada. A city populated by immigrants is always a border town. Scattered across the city are ethnic enclaves, like Chinatown and Little India. In Toronto, they’re marked with bilingual street signs. Border towns embedded in a border town.

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My parents were part of the first wave of non-European arrivals that immediately followed Canadian immigration reform in the late 1960s. When I was a child, my family regularly visited the stretch of Gerrard Street populated by expatriate South Asians: a little piece of the subcontinent overlaid on grey, indifferent Toronto. Signs in Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, and more. The scents of spices wafting out of grocery stores. The sounds of Bollywood coming out of speakers. For my parents, they could briefly be somewhere that felt like home.

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As a teenager exploring the city, I regularly wandered through Chinatown markets. Signs I couldn’t read, brands I couldn’t identify, produce I didn’t recognise. It was the real-life version of Miéville’s Un Lun Dun or Gaiman’s Neverwhere; the alternate world snuggled up against the familiar one. If I turned left on Spadina Avenue, I could be an immigrant in my own hometown.

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Visiting Little India was a very different experience in my twenties than it was when I was tagging along after my parents. I found myself in the awkward interstices between looking like I belonged there and yet feeling like an outside to the culture. I barely spoke the language (or rather, any of the languages) I heard around me. I had long since stopped watching Bollywood movies in favour of midnight screenings of European art films at my local repertory cinema. At the time, all that I really felt I shared with the culture of my parents was the love of the food, and my infrequent visits were mostly to stock up on Indian groceries, and to have a masala dosa or channa bhatura for lunch. It was many years before I came to realize that both cultures were building blocks of my identity, rather than one being chosen and one imposed.

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I’ve always loved that the ethnic neighbourhoods in Toronto aren’t just informal constructs. The street signs that mark neighbourhoods send a paradoxical but clear message: We are all strangers here. We all belong here.

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Following in the footsteps of her parents, Deb Chachra emigrated from her homeland and now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can follow her peregrinations on Twitter.