Leonora Indira King’s death on Dec. 21, 2024, was sudden and unexpected. The Parc-Extension community worker had been in and out of the hospital for weeks, yet her positivity was contagious.
“It’ll pass,” she would say about her health issues to Rose Ndjel, the director of the non-profit Afrique au Féminin, for whom King did some work.
“It will be OK tomorrow,” Ndjel said King would say.
King was 42, ate well, practised kung fu and had too many things to return to anyway.
Earlier in November, her illness forced her to pause activities at her own non-profit, the Parc-Ex Curry Collective, a mutual-aid initiative and catering service that she founded in 2021.
Operating in one of Montreal’s most multicultural neighbourhoods, the collective employs women with precarious immigration statuses. They prepare affordable meals for delivery while building up their financial autonomy in Quebec.
About a dozen women — “the ladies,” as King called them — staff the collective at all times.
Whenever one was able to get on her feet and improve her situation, King would bring in a new woman, says Faiz Abhuani, the founder and director of Brique par Brique, another non-profit operating in Parc-Extension.
“It was important for her to help women, not because they’re her friends [or] whatever, but because they’re truly kind of overlooked or uncared for in our economy by virtue of being asylum seekers — by virtue of being isolated,” he said.
Leonora Indira King spearheaded the Parc-Ex Curry Collective to help women who have limited employment options because of their immigration status.
After King died, Ndjel rented a 50-seat yellow bus so the Curry Collective chefs and other women from Parc-Extension could attend the memorial service for her in Ottawa. She says the funeral home wasn’t big enough to contain everyone who showed up.
“You can see which impact she was having,” said Ndjel.
Ndjel is organizing another memorial service for King at the Afrique au Féminin’s office in Montreal Saturday so the rest of the community can get a chance to pay their respects, she says.
The apple and the tree
A Guyana native, Nadira King raised her daughter Leonora in Montreal to the sounds of soca music and cod sizzling in oil.
It was in Guyana that King watched her mother distribute donated items and meals to the less fortunate, whenever they’d visit. It’s also where she met other Guyanese women trapped in abusive relationships, much like Nadira had experienced.
“She saw me as a survivor basically,” said Nadira.
According to the people closest to her, much of King’s work was shaped by Nadira’s experiences as a single mother in a foreign country.
In her earlier years in community work, King taught self-defence classes for women, worked with women experiencing abuse and organized workshops to help immigrant women through the visa process. Eventually, with Brique par Brique and Afrique au Féminin’s help, she set up the Parc-Ex Curry Collective.
“Her perspective is that ain’t nobody ever incubated nobody. ‘I’m an independent woman and I did this with the ladies,'” said Abhuani, chuckling.
Abhuani and King would speak on the phone every Friday for years to discuss work and how to enact change on the ground, among other things. For him, the best way to support marginalized people is by improving access to shelter.
“For her, it was all about dinner and dance,” he said. “She’s always felt like community was important, and the foundation of community is food [and] dance and pleasure and music and everything that nourishes your body and your soul.”
In November, on the day of her surgery, King was supposed to accept a community impact award by Ascend Montreal. She had sewn a dress for the occasion made entirely out of canvas rice and flour bags.
The dress now hangs proudly in her mother’s home in Limoges, Ont.
Bed of roses
In Nadira’s garden, a bed of roses lays dormant under the snow. She planted it when her son, Ricky, died three years ago. She had cared for him for 16 years after a car accident left him in a vegetative state.
In the spring, Nadira will plant new roses to honour King.
The Curry Collective remains on pause for the time being. Ndjel says King wanted to see it grow and become even bigger than it was.
The day before she died, King attended Afrique au Féminin’s monthly Friday gathering. After a month of treatments, she broke the news of her illness to the women who didn’t already know.
Ndjel said they all cried together, then she brought King into her office.
“She told me, ‘Boss, I just have 42 years, I didn’t do many things. I can’t go now.’ And she gone,” said Ndjel. “Sometimes in my life I see things coming, but this, I didn’t see it coming.”
Nadira says she’d like to continue what her daughter started with the Parc-Ex Curry Collective, though it’s too early to tell what the future holds.
“It would make Leonora, I think, her soul rest [that] I am going to just watch and make sure that these ladies are taken care of.”
