Choghadiya in Jersey City today

India Square on Newark Avenue — Bombay Street to everyone who shops there — is the Gujarati commercial heart of the East Coast, and its Navratri garba and Diwali street festival are among the largest held outside India. Practice in Hudson County is mostly vertical: a purohit works his way through the towers of Journal Square and Newport doing satyanarayan katha and griha pravesh, flat by flat. The sankalpa in those living rooms needs the Jersey City sunrise, not the IST still set on a parent's second phone. The big campuses — Bridgewater, Robbinsville — are a weekend drive, not a Tuesday evening option.

Eastern Time with DST, identical switch dates to Manhattan a mile east across the Hudson. The civil clock is the same; the sunrise minute is not, and the Rahu Kalam block on this page is computed from the Hudson County coordinates rather than borrowed from the New York table.

• India Square (Newark Avenue)

  Journal Square / West Side

  The Gujarati festival core of Hudson County. Street Navratri and the Diwali programme run on the Eastern civil date, with the evening starting after the local sunset — not the Ahmedabad one.

• BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham

  Robbinsville (weekend drive south)

  The region's largest complex and where most Hudson County families go for a formal darshan. Its public calendar is Eastern Time despite the Indian stonework.