What He Said

What could my mother be
to yours? What kin my father
to yours anyway? And how
did you and I meet ever?
But in love
Our hearts have mingled
like red earth and pouring rain.

Cempulappeyanirar was a Tamil poet who wrote about 2000 years ago. In Tamil literary tradition many works remained anonymous and there is the practice of identifying a poet by a phrase or word from his work. So “cempulapeyanirar” literally means ‘the poet of red earth and pouring rain’.

This is the source for the title of Vikram Chandra’s first novel ‘Red Earth and Pouring Rain’.