In South India, as Shoba Narayan relates in her memoir Monsoon Diary (Villard), food is enriched by ritual importance, from the choru-unnal (the first meal of an infant) to the elaborate feast that commemorates a marriage. When she left Madras to attend school in the United States, Narayan craved bowls of yogurt and rice to ease her homesickness: “While the foreign flavors teased my palate, I needed Indian food to ground me.”