The U.S.’ biggest Navratri celebration, a 15-year-old, 20,000-person raas-garba under a large tent in Edison, New Jersey, has been canceled (via SAJA). The event’s tent supplier shipped all its stock to Florida in the aftermath of the hurricanes, and the new vendors wanted more money than the organizers had on hand:

“We are the richest per-capita community, and they are calling it off because of money?” said Sylvester Fernandez, an Indian-American engineer from Edison and Republican candidate for Congress. “That’s just wrong, that’s just pathetic.”

Yes, Gujarati teens will be deprived of their most efficient flirting grounds this year, forced to gather in small high school gyms. Dandia’s counter-rotating circles are like a socialist dance club, everyone has to dance with everyone else, and (bonus!) they’re parentally-approved. So if you’re a respectable New Jersey parent and your child runs off with a circus freak, you know who to blame. I’m just sayin’.

In the past, the celebration has faced tensions over noise levels with uncalled-for religious overtones:

[T]he Edison Township Council… are paying them to break the law so they could bang their heathen drums in obeisance to their heathen gods until 4 a.m. on the Sabbath… –The Rev. Kenneth Matto, Edison

 The preeminence of the Gujarati community in New Jersey did not come without a fight:

[I]n September 1987, a group calling itself the ‘dotbusters’ wrote a letter to a Jersey City newspaper. The letter read: “We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her.” A couple of weeks after that, an Indian doctor, Kaushal Sharan, was beaten up by three white men. And three days later, in the neighbouring town of Hoboken, an Asian Indian, Navroze Mody, was beaten to death by a gang of 11 men.

New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, who just resigned in a stranger-than-fiction outing scandal, was a key player:

For several years the group fought with elected officials for the rights of the growing South Asian businesses along the Oak Tree Road. Their strongest opponent was the Democratic mayor of Woodbridge, Jim McGreevey, who at one point imposed a 1.5 mile no-parking zone around the shopping area. “Where in America do you see police officers go around with six-inch rulers to measure the distance between parked cars and the kerb?” Kothari asks. “… [W]hy would they not impose it in the other business districts…?”

For more on Edison, check out Suburban Sahibs by my friend S. Mitra Kalita and ‘The Garba’ by Chitra Divakaruni, a purplish poem with a flashback intense:

… We clap hot palms like thunder.  And

the mango branches grow into trees.
Under our flashing feet, the floor is packed black soil.
Damp faces gleam and flicker in torchlight.
The smell of harvest hay
is thick and narcotic
in our throat.  We spin and spin
back to the villages of our mothers’ mothers.
We leave behind

the men, a white blur
like moonlight on empty bajra fields
seen from a speeding train.