On Gerrard Street, the skyline is dramatically different from downtown Toronto, where I take the subway to get to Toronto’s Little India. Like many Little Indias in other parts of North America, high-rises disappear in this neighbourhood. The posters on shop windows replace Nike and Gap, we are suddenly reminded that for two dollars 50 cents, we can call home for 50 minutes or more. The apparel stores inevitably resemble a middle brow Indian mohalla with the mannequins dressed in garments that come straight out of B Grade Bollywood films. Beauty parlours advertise the Madhuri Dixit look from Devdas or the Aishwarya Rai look for the bride-to-be.

It is no longer an imagined community as Benedict Anderson would like us to believe. It is ground reality that Indians have inhabited parts of the world and turned them into their own country. These enclaves known as Little Indias are identical in most places that I have been to. You can easily transpose a Pooja International, a desi store in Thornbury, Melbourne, for a store of the same size on Gerrard Street, Toronto, or any such store on Devon Street in Chicago, which comprises another large South Asian neighbourhood in North America. Walk into such a store on Gerrard Street, and there is the fridge loaded with Thums ups, rasmalais and Maazas. Bottles of Parachute or Vatika hair oil, papads and Bombay mixes are lined up in front of the counter. These are items that you might not give a second thought to in India, but feel quite excited to get your hands on here! Behind the counter is an array of the latest DVDs of Bollywood films. I have come across the most interesting movies in such stores, which I would possibly have missed out on back home. These are usually low budget, niche films that don’t make it to all multiplexes. Pirated DVDs come for two dollars and shop owners always tell you to return them if they don’t work. Five times out of 10 they don’t and on your next trip they are amicably exchanged for a good one – it’s what people expect, so no one gets upset.

The striking similarities across Little Indias become uncanny while dining in an Indian restaurant. The Tandoori is invariably an unnatural deep maroonish red because of the added colour. The cauliflowers are a tad undercooked and the deserts will vary between shahi jamuns, kheer and rasmalai. For a Bengali person like me, the stop in a Bangladeshi fish shop is mandatory. When I was living in Chicago for five years I made routine trips to Fish Corner, a Bangladeshi store for my rohu and hilsa. On Gerrard Street too, I wasn’t disappointed though I had to walk about a bit until I located the familiar Bengali letters on a doorway. There is usually a couple running the show, with the man handling male customers and his wife dealing with the women. I remember the lady in Fish Corner in Chicago whose world revolved around this frozen fish. The family lived at the back of the store and she hadn’t stepped out of the place much. One of her few windows of access to the outer world were clients like me, whose ‘liberated’ lives were a matter of immense curiosity. Once, the shop on Gerrard Street had a family meal cooking at the back. It was like stepping into someone’s kitchen unawares.

For Indians missing Indian smells, flavours and rhythm, these Little Indias offer retreats into a pschologically known terrain. But when compared with the thriving food industry back home or with Mexican, Ethiopian or Carribean cuisine in the West, there are few Indian restaurants in these Little Indias that stand out. There are exceptions like Zafraan in Sydney or a couple of stand outs in London, but these are truly exceptions.

Indian cuisine is mostly, down-market cheap food. Most places employ untrained cooks who learn on the job. The curries vary between three or four basic ones and the chicken do piazza would taste incredibly like the chicken resala, except for a dash of sugar added to the latter. The veggies are no different. The clientele continues to be largely desi and there is little effort to become more mainstream, perhaps by updating décor or including a few healthier options on the menu. Here therefore is the explanation for a Pooja International not being allowed to compete with a more mainstream grocery store like the Safeway in Melbourne for a market share, or why Indian cuisine or jewellery cannot take the giant leap that Middle Eastern cuisine has in the West.

With South Asians buying up Chorus and Arcelor and aiming to establish themselves as big players on the international stage, it is a contradiction that the more general stream of South Asian businesses in the West confine themselves to their Little India ghettos. For the Indian diaspora to realise its full potential, we need a transformation from enclavisation to integration, from isolation or insularity to inclusion or amalgamation, which does not mean we give up cultural value in any way. The Chinese in any part of the world would be a worthy example. We need to get beyond the neighbourhood spice stores and be able to envisage Indian chains that will compete with the Sanisburys and Safeways and to the day when the Indian gulab jamun can compete with Godiva chocolates.