I grew up Hindu in Texas, putting Christmas lights up in September.
A few years ago, I was in autumnal New Jersey, looking up at the festive stringed bulbs, too.
“It’s pakka home,” my cousin says in Tamil, mouth full with dabeli sandwich, face lit blue and red and green, using the word that extremifies anything.
My cousin lived in a smattering of the largest cities of India, from the north, where they speak Gujarati, to the cosmopolitan middle, where they speak Hindi, to the southern tip, our Tamil motherland. A few years ago, she immigrated to Jersey City, the place with the highest concentration of Indians in the Western Hemisphere.
Today, her in-laws are visiting, fresh off the flight from Kerala. And in New Jersey’s Journal Square, specifically the stretch around Newark Avenue known as India Square, all kinds of immigrant generations like ours — and more — exist. Desi folks arrived here en masse in the 1970s, and they’re still arriving today. Moreover, though it’s named India Square, this community center is a haven for a diversity of South Asians, from Bangladesh, to Nepal, to Pakistan.
But to many, it doesn’t matter where you come from: regardless of religion and homeland, lights are put up in early fall. It’s time for Navaratri and Diwali: the post-monsoon celebration of autumn, a time to celebrate light and goodness.
It takes only about 20 minutes to get Journal Square via the PATH train from the West Village and an eight minute walk to get to the action on Newark Avenue. You should go. You should also eat in the neighborhood: on one block, you can get yards of sugarcane juiced straight into your cup; fish butchered in Bengal’s best; over 70 types of dosa; living biryani history of the Mughal Empire; and much more. Here’s where I love right now.
