The family lived in an apartment building in Burlingame, close to Sathyanarayana's husband's high-tech job. As her husband was settling into his new official role, everyday life for Sathyanarayana was monotonous and lonely. Far removed from her family and friends in India, responsible for a rambunctious and demanding toddler, Sathyanarayana desperately longed for some adult conversation. "I felt so suffocated within the walls of the apartment without a single person to talk to all through the day," recalls Sathyanarayana.

But all that changed when the couple was invited to a social evening with friends living in Sunnyvale. "When we came here, I saw so many Indians out walking on the streets, Indian kids playing outside and so many Indian shops. I was very impressed," says Sathyanarayana.

So impressed was she that she convinced her husband to move to the Sunnyvale area, and for more than a year now, her husband has commuted from the South Bay to Burlingame and back every day.

For the Bay Area Indian community, Sunnyvale is more than just another city—it's a reminder of home, providing the means for a lifestyle that is hard to come by anywhere else in the United States. Almost every block on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale today sports an Indian restaurant and grocery or video rental store.

The local Indian community affectionately refers to that stretch of El Camino Real as "Gandhi Nagar"—Gandhi for the famous pacifist Mahatma Gandhi and "Nagar" meaning "city" in Hindi. The popularity of Gandhi Nagar is so far-reaching that even people in India know about that area of Sunnyvale.

The Indian influx into the city began with the tech boom of the 1990s. The 1990 census recorded an Indian population of only 1.7 percent, but by 2000 Indians had emerged as the fastest-growing Asian immigrant population in the city. Today they account for 10 percent of the population.

Toward the later part of the 1990s, as India began to export its brainpower and as workers flocked to the Silicon Valley on H1-B work visas, Sunnyvale—with its clean, small-town atmosphere and innumerable apartments—became a popular "desi" destination. ("Desi" is Indian slang for anything Indian.) As the population began to grow, so did the demand for "desi" food, groceries and all things that reminded Indians of their homeland.

Joseph Thomas emigrated from Bangalore in India to work as a mechanical engineer at Dest Corporation in Milpitas in 1982. As the tech boom began, he saw a huge potential market for Indian groceries in Silicon Valley. In 1997 Thomas opened Coconut Hill, a niche grocery store on Murphy Road that carried goods and movies specifically from Southern India.

"When I opened my store in '97, people used to come from all over the Bay Area and even as far as Sacramento. During that time there were just three or four other Indian stores in the Sunnyvale and Santa Clara area," says Thomas. So popular was Coconut Hill and its products that there were times when Thomas "could not handle the high demand." In 1999, he opened a second store in Fremont, which also has a significant Indian population.

Photograph by Sarah Ruby Brian Hyde enjoys the lunch buffet at Banjara restaurant in Sunnyvale. Hyde, originally from England, works nearby at Broadcom.

"The Indian restaurants then were just small halls with four walls. There was no life or character to these places, and I wanted to do something different," Muvva says. In 1999, he opened Banjara Indian Cuisine at the Sunnyvale Town Center. Muvva, who holds a master's degree in engineering and has worked with firms like Apple and VLSI Technologies, modeled his restaurant after a sports bar and took full advantage of the Cricket World Cup that was held that year. Muvva installed huge television screens in his restaurant and showed live telecasts of the matches.

When it comes to cricket, Indians are a breed apart. In India, during the cricket season, people young and old sometimes take several days off from school and work to stay at home and watch matches. To an Indian, cricket is as precious as baseball, basketball and football, all rolled into one. And when Muvva brought televised live cricket to an immigrant population starved of their national pastime, the idea was a humongous hit. Banjara, with its spacious interior and stylish ethnic decor, became an iconic symbol in the Bay Area.

Muvva also took advantage of another favorite Indian pastime: movies. India is the world's largest movie producer, beating out even Hollywood—it churns out close to 1,000 movies in various languages every year.

When the AMC theaters at the Sunnyvale Town Center were not doing too well, Muvva offered to buy the theater and began to screen Indian movies exclusively. The cinema, which was renamed IMC, has become a landmark to the Northern California Indian community.

Komalavilas is another South Indian restaurant that took advantage of the H1-B wave. This tiny, traditional restaurant targets the niche market of young South Indian bachelors who long for some home-cooked food. Komalavilas' owner, A.N. Narayanaswami, says the restaurant is styled more along the lines of a college cafeteria than a regular bistro.

"I come from a very traditional South Indian family and found most of the restaurants in the area offered only food that was very heavy on spices and 'masalas' that bear no resemblance to home-cooked food. And when I found a huge number of young men coming into the country who longed for that South Indian taste, I decided to start Komalavilas," says Narayanaswami.

Komalavilas is very strict in its cooking style. The restaurant uses absolutely no garlic and a bare minimum of onions—trademarks of the traditional South Indian Brahmin style of cooking.

What is more interesting is the fact that most of the employees at the restaurant, from Narayanaswami to the managers and cooks, are well-educated professionals.

Narayanaswami himself is an entrepreneur who is on the board of several high-tech firms both here and in India. He holds an M.B.A. from UCLA, and one of his cooks has a Ph.D. in microbiology from MIT. "All the people who work with me are at a stage where their children have grown; they enjoy traditional cooking and want to give back to the community," says Narayanaswami.

The growth of Indian businesses in Sunnyvale has become a huge boon to the South Bay Indian community. Traditionally, Indian stores in the United States have been small, overstocked and overcrowded places that made Indian shopping a tedious and tiring experience. But as new stores mushroom and the competition between them increases, the owners of Indian stores are now trying to offer a greater level of sophistication to their customers.

India Cash and Carry was the first Indian store in the South Bay to introduce the "spacious and roomy" concept in Indian grocery shopping. The store, located on El Camino Real at the intersection of Henderson, was a huge hit in the Indian community when it opened two years ago. "People were so happy to see such a spacious grocery store and came from faraway places just to take a look at this place," says owner Neelakshi Kumar.

From an average Indian shopper's point of view, shopping for Indian goods in Sunnyvale has reached a level of refinement that is unperceived even in their home country. "Here I buy vegetables that are normally not available in the area where we lived back in India. Stores here stock items from all parts of India, and that gives me the option to try different cuisines from various regions of the country," says Sathyanarayana.

As stores compete with each other to attract customers, a silent and steady price war is being waged. In Sunnyvale alone, there are close to 20 small and medium-size Indian stores, each trying to get a bit of the same market. But the downturn in the economy has hit these stores especially hard.

"There is too much competition now, and all of us are depending on this H1-B market. Because of the layoffs and bad economic scene, many of our customers have moved away from this area to other, less expensive places like Sacramento and even other states. Some families have also gone back to India," says Kumar.

Indian restaurants, like other restaurant businesses, are suffering, too. But the clientele here is more mixed and is not dependent solely on the Indian community. "I still get a fairly good crowd from offices during lunch hours on weekdays. But business is down at least 20 percent because of the economy," says Muvva.

Most business owners now agree that not all the Indian stores and restaurants can survive. "No business can sustain this cutthroat competition. With this price war, stores and restaurants are killing each other. I believe down the line many of them have to go," says Muvva.

But for now, for the Indian shopper, things haven't been this good in a long, long time.