She started at the bottom.

Really, she did.

“Underground,” Liloo Alim confirms.

Now one of Toronto’s most enduring of characters, and as close to a one-woman vault as this town has, she’s reminding me that she was hired to be a parking cashier (“now it’s all automated”), at a still-nascent Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville, 39 remarkable years ago.

“Can you add?” asked the guy who was interviewing her at the time, she recalls. She sure could.

More pertinently, Alim — new to Canada, newly vamoosed from a marriage, and a fresh new mom to a toddler — had personality in spades, not to mention a certain disposition. It wasn’t long before she was moving up in the hotel ranks, eventually easing her way into a position that made her the first female concierge of a hotel in Canada.

“They saw something. They saw something,” she repeats, regarding her swift ascension, adding that for her, the gig in parking grew solely out of desperation. “I needed a job. Everywhere I went, ‘Canadian experience,’ ‘Canadian experience.’ It’s all I got. I had no friends here, and a huge culture shock. I’d never seen snow . . . plus, I’d never lived a day alone in my life, and I had a little baby.”

Ever since, she’s been inextricable from the Four Seasons, a hotel brand that sprouted here. It’s hard to imagine the Toronto flagship without the woman who measures about Dolly Parton-short in terms of vertical reach, and whose natural enthusiasm is one that cannot be replicated in emojis. Alas, soon we’ll have to: Alim just made official her decision to retire, come October.

Over hot water and ginger, and flaunting a voice that still has timbres of her native Mumbai, the legend filled me in at — where else? — the Four Seasons: “I kept spinning my wheels (about leaving) — one week, I was like, yes, yes, yes. The next, no, no, no. But then, I’ve always thought: everybody has a shelf-life, and I want to go before my shelf-life is done. I want to go when, inside of me, I know I’m still at the top, and before I’m redundant.”

Few would use the R-word about Alim. The hotel’s general manager, Konrad Gstrein, uses an M-word, among many, to describe her instead: magician.

“As famous for her determination as she is for her warm smile . . . it’s hard to imagine the number of requests she’s fulfilled on behalf of our guest over the span of her career,” he wrote recently in a company-wide email. “No matter how small or complex or seeming impossible they are, her telltale response has always been, ‘Let me see what I can do for you,’ before moving quickly to, as she likes to say, ‘start pulling rabbits out of hats.’”

It’s only the particular rabbits that have changed, presumably. Sitting with Alim, now a grandmother, it strikes me how much of the history of aspirational Toronto lies between her ears.

In the ’80s, she was the woman working the phones, no doubt, to snag a pair of prized tickets to The Phantom of the Opera.

In 1994, she was likely working to reserve just the right table for just the right people at the see-and-be-seen Prego Della Piazza, hidden away in the courtyard behind the Church of the Redeemer, and owned by the then-infamous Michael Carlevalle.

In the aughts — who knows? — she was probably doing her thing to procure the odd guest some Uggs.

Alim outlasted the original location — the Four Seasons moved a few years ago from its Avenue Road digs to Yorkville Ave. at Bay St. — and even shoehorned some time in Ottawa, where she held down the concierge at the capital’s short-lived Four Seasons.

The boldface she’s seen come and go? It’s ranged from Pierre Trudeau to Justin Trudeau, and from standard-bearer Tony Bennett to young Jaden Smith, who made a bit of ruckus earlier this year — possibly you heard? — when he claimed that the hotel “spiked” his pancakes with cheese!

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Asked what the secret to being a concierge is, the lady has one above all: “Attitude.” Simple.

It’s a foundational principle that came into further clarity when Alim was dispatched a few years ago to Mumbai to help launch a new Four Seasons, India’s first. Not only did the experience of going back to her hometown help underline just how much her own confidence had grown since leaving the megalopolis as a young girl, but working with the young staff at the hotel was an eye-opener in itself.

“The biggest challenge was telling them how not to just be friendly, but efficient. They’re very, very friendly in Mumbai, and apologetic. ‘So sorry, so sorry.’ But because of the built-in caste system, to some extent, I found they were reluctant talking directly to the guests and VIPs . . . so I had to show them, you have to ask the guests questions. Probing questions. How are you going to know what they really want, otherwise?”

Her months in India, and seeing the transformation of the city, is something she calls “one of the highlights of my life.”

On that highlight reel, too, close to four decades later: seriously getting into the Toronto International Film Festival, through her time at the old Four Seasons (where much of the talent was housed), and becoming one of its biggest champs.

Alim is easily one of the most dedicated cinephiles in town. Bollywood: what she says she was raised on. Her first film at TIFF? She remembers it vividly.

“I’ll never forget: someone gave me passes . . . and I exchanged them for tickets to a Korean movie (at the long-gone University Theatre on Bloor St.). That was that moment when I realized: Oh my God. This is what I loved. It was an amazing movie — with two brothers. Three hours long. And then it was the next year, and the next year . . . and the next year.”

Most years, she sees about 30 movies during the fest, and counts as one of her best memories getting hugs, one by one, from the whole cast of Slumdog Millionaire (including Dev Patel), when they were passing through the hotel to go to a press conference, shortly after she’d seen their buzz-catching movie.

She has one more TIFF left, at least in her official capacity at the Four Seasons. She’s almost giddy talking about.

Meanwhile, there’s also a retirement party on the horizon, and — irony of ironies being what they are — she tells a funny story about the guy who runs human resources at her hotel, and is now organizing that very party: turns out it’s the same guy whom Alim herself hired as a bellman years and years ago. Full circles or what?

Correction – September 7, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the name of the movie Slumdog Millionaire

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