WRITTEN BY ANUPA MISTRY

For most of the year and a half that I lived outside of Toronto, I was homesick. I took every chance I could to leave the teeming American metropolis that was my temporary home, and the flight, especially on a clear day, was often the best part of returning. My eyes would follow the clouds making shadows on the grey-green waves of Lake Ontario below until the city’s perpetually-unfinished skyline emerged in the distance. It was there, heart hanging in the sky over the city, that entire neighbourhoods separated by winding avenues and highways compressed into a feeling that’s the closest I’ve come to a sense of belonging.

The Monet effect invariably dissolved shortly after touchdown, when gentrification, poverty, and increased segregation, ongoing realities of contemporary life in Toronto, became visible.

To mimic that sky-high sense of connection, I listen to Zaki Ibrahim. Through her catalogue, which spans three EPs and two LPs, it’s possible to access the version of Toronto that, perhaps, only exists as a feeling. Zaki’s music is an atmosphere unto itself. Bass-powered and melodic, it is the sort of warm sound that fills up small bars and watering holes across the city, leaving the cold front windows with an offering of dew. Despite this potency, the music isn’t concerned with persuasion. Instead, like Zaki herself, it meanders across vast distances — from Cape Town to Vancouver — in search of resonances.

Earlier this year, the Toronto urbanist Jay Pitter wrote about “forgotten densities.” The term accounts for the people, neighbourhoods, and housing situations that aren’t adequately captured by demographic analysis that favours a more utopian, middle class, progressively planned kind of urban density.

When I listen to Zaki’s music I hear the long, echoing apartment hallways and late night bus rides and evening shifts that is life off the dancefloor for those in Toronto’s forgotten densities. The only other time I can see the city as a whole so clearly is from the sky above.