Navratri Garba and Dandiya Nights

For nine nights each autumn, Mumbai's maidans stop being cricket grounds. As the Ashwin lunar fortnight brings Navratri — usually falling somewhere between late September and mid-October — open plots across the western and eastern suburbs are strung with lights, a canopy goes up, and by about nine in the evening thousands of people are moving in slow, widening circles to the beat of a dhol.

• The city's Gujarati, Kutchi and Marwari neighbourhoods are the heart of it: Borivali, Kandivali and Malad in the far west, Vile Parle and Andheri closer in, Ghatkopar and Mulund across on the eastern side, with Dadar and Girgaum keeping their own older, more neighbourly versions in lane-sized spaces between buildings.
• Almost none of it is staged for visitors, which is exactly why it is worth seeing. Two dances share the night.
• Garba is the older and gentler form — barefoot circles revolving around a garbi, a perforated earthen lamp, or a small decorated platform holding an image of the goddess, with a clap-and-step pattern a newcomer can pick up in twenty minutes by shadowing the person ahead.
• Dandiya-raas comes later and faster, danced in pairs with short lacquered sticks, partners rotating steadily through the circle so that you end up playing against half the ground before the night is out.
• An aarti generally opens proceedings; the tempo climbs through the evening and the best hour is often well after eleven.
• Costume is half the spectacle — mirror-worked chaniya cholis, men in kediyu and bandhani turbans, entire extended families colour-coordinated to a theme.
• Practicalities vary enormously from ground to ground.
• Many housing-society and gully garbas are free and informally welcoming; the larger commercial grounds run on passes sold locally, and arrangements change year to year, so ask on the spot rather than assuming.
• Loudspeaker cut-off times are set each season by the authorities, so finishing hours shift.
• Watch a round or two from the edge before joining, keep to the outermost circle while you learn, remove footwear near the goddess platform, and ask before photographing individual dancers — especially children.
• Weekday nights are far less crowded than the final weekend, and suburban trains thin out sharply after midnight.
• Food is a genuine reason to come.
• Because much of the crowd is fasting, the stalls ringing the grounds specialise in farali (vrat) cooking, which is vegetarian by definition and usually avoids onion, garlic and ordinary grains: sabudana khichdi and sabudana vada, puris rolled from rajgira or singhada flour, spiced potatoes and sweet potato, kand, fresh fruit, dry-fruit laddoo, buttermilk and salted lassi, seasoned with rock salt rather than table salt.
• Outside the fasting stalls you will find the usual suburban repertoire of pav bhaji, sev puri, dabeli and Gujarati thali.
• Mumbai at large is a major seafood-eating city, so treat none of this as automatic — look for a clearly displayed pure-vegetarian board and confirm with the stallholder or cashier before you order, at the maidan and at any restaurant you walk to afterwards.