THE pulsating beat of a Hindi song pumped out from a record store plainly named Bollywood Music.
Nearby, its neighbours hawk just about anything from saris to vegetarian samosas. There’s Bombay Boutique, Mita Jewellers, Indian Taj Restaurant and Delhi Palace Sweets, just to name a few.
“The place makes you forget momentarily that you are in New York,” said S. Ganeson, a counsellor at the Permanent Mission of Malaysia to the United Nations.
That’s Little India, located in Jackson Heights, Queens, on a short strip of 74th Street, which is also known as Kalpana Chawla Way.
(Chawla was the India-born American female astronaut who died at the age of 42 along with six other crew members in the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia three years ago.)
Most of the people here speak English with their distinct Indian accent.
A month ago, Little India was all stirred up over lentils. The price of the small seeds had hit big time, with one pound of white lentils, for example, almost doubling to US$1 from 65 cents.
Prices shot up when India, the biggest exporter of lentils, decided to impose a ban on exports following a drought that led to reduced yields.
“The price is still high,” one restaurant owner said.
Little India is home to the biggest number of South Asian immigrants in New York.
A pretty young woman attending to customers at Delhi Palace Sweets said she was a Muslim from Bangladesh.
Her small shop sells a large variety of pastries and desserts such as jilebi (made of flour, yoghurt and ghee) and samosa chaat, made of potato and cumin seeds. They were priced at US$4 per pound.
According to Ganeson, Little India of New York is a lively place where you can find fresh food products and spices from the sub-continent.
“However, it is not so similar to what we have in Malaysia because we are more towards southern India,” he explained.
The Indians here remain steadfast in celebrating Deepavali although they acknowledge that it could never be on the grand scale that it is in their homeland.
“We used to play firecrackers back in India,” said Surinder Pal, as he reminisced of his days in Punjab.
Married with four children aged between eight and 23, he said his family still maintain practices like putting on new clothes and jewellery for the Festival of Lights. “We pray and light the lamps.”
Surinder, who came to the United States in 1979, runs a fabric shop here. His saris are priced from US$20 to US$200.
Restaurant employee Ravi Verma said he had already bought new shirts and shoes. Prayers are a must, too, he said, gesturing to the altars of Ganesha and Lakshmi inside the restaurant.
“There is also a big temple here that I go to,” said Ravi, 36, who came from New Delhi. New York has been home to him for almost 10 years.
Here in Jackson Heights, Little India seems like a flourishing place, especially during the days leading to Deepavali.
(Sunday October 22, 2006)
