This was the first year we attended a Garba celebrating the Hindu festival of Navaratri. Garba is a Gujarati dance held in the first part of the evening, while Dandiya, which involves dancing with two bamboo or wooden sticks that are clicked together with the sticks of the person in front of you, is held later in the evening. During a break in the five-hour dance, a small meal and chai are served. Live music accompanies the dance held at a local high school gym each October.

We’d been invited to the festivities by Sonal Patel (on the left), who we’d recently met after she took over a local Indian grocery store called Indo Euro that we’d been shopping at for the past couple of years.