This Is NEW YORK I JOIN
THE THRONGS STREAMING through the carved granite gateway of the temple. It’s Ganesha Chaturthi, the festival of the birth of Lord Ganesh, beloved elephant-headed Hindu god of wisdom. To a thundering drum and the blare of a nadaswaram (like an enlarged clarinet), a bare-chested priest leads a procession around the central shrine, where a statue of Ganesh sits decked out in garlands and pompoms.
Suddenly, frantic volunteers rush about, shooing back the crowds draped in maroons and magentas and yellows. Smaller statues of Ganesh enter, five in all, on pallets supported on devotees’ shoulders. The devotees line up and start swaying to the surging rhythm of the music.
Is this Kerala? Varanasi? Nope. We’re in the New York City borough of Queens—the Flushing neighborhood, to be exact—a half-hour subway ride across the East River from Grand Central Station in Manhattan. The celebration is happening at the Hindu Temple Society of North America, also known as the Ganesh Temple.
I have lived in Queens—in Jackson Heights, a few miles from Flushing—since the mid 1980s, but it had never occurred to me to attend a service at the Ganesh Temple. I am not Hindu. Religion has never played a role in my life. I grew up as a pork-eating Jew in the atheist USSR, where Jewishness was decreed an ethnic identity, not a religious one. Today, my partner, Barry, and I are culinary multiculturalists. We make gefilte fish on Passover, ham for Russian Orthodox Easter, herbaceous Persian pilafs for Nowruz—drawn to the foods and the festive traditions but not to any actual god. It was the promise, in fact, of the famous dosas at
