Under Erasure - editorial note

The walk that led out through the apple trees –

the narrow, crumbling path of brick embossed

among the clumps of grass, the scattered leaves – has vanished now.

Each spring the peonies

come back, to drape their heavy bolls across

the walk that led out through the apple trees, as if to show the way – until the breeze

dismantles them, and petals drift and toss

among the clumps of grass. The scattered leaves half fill a plaited basket left to freeze

and thaw, and gradually darken into moss.

The walk that led out through the apple trees has disappeared – unless, down on your knees,

searching beneath the vines that twist and cross

among the clumps of grass, the scattered leaves, you scrape, and find – simplest of mysteries,

forgotten all this time, but not quite lost –

the walk that led out through the apple trees

among the clumps of grass, the scattered leaves.

(Palimpsests by Jared Carter)

To find that path you have to get close to the ground.

You have to be okay with scraping, with dampness and moss, with peonies that bloom and then fall apart.

You have to look for what’s been covered over; the thing that’s not quite lost even though the map says it is.

That willingness to kneel down and look, to accept the mess and the minor discoveries, is the center of what we imagined when we started Khôra.

We’re Vedant and Toshali, doctoral scholars at Shiv Nadar University, India and Dublin City University, Ireland.

A lot of our days are spent writing, reading, drafting, revising. Somewhere along the line, we kept noticing the same things: the most alive moments weren’t the finished papers or the polished presentations. They were the half-sentences in the margins. The voice notes at midnight. The “I’m not sure yet, but…” conversations in hallways and over tea.

Those hallway whispers and incomplete conversations are Khôra’s origin story.

Khôra is for the in-between. It’s for the scraped, damp, persistent bits of thinking that are often left out of clean narratives. We welcome the unfinished: the draft with too many questions, the sketch that doesn’t yet look like anything, the recording that holds a good idea but not a polished argument. We want work that remembers that knowledge is layered, a palimpsest of traces, and that meaning often appears where forms overlap, hesitate, and bleed into one another.

We don’t want to add another disciplinary axis. We want to register what life already does as it leaks across boundaries, layers itself into surprising shapes, and refuses tidy conclusions. Khôra privileges encounter over verdict, curiosity over authority, and invitation over gatekeeping. It is a place that lets different practices talk without forcing them into a single order.

If you’re tired of polishing everything into a finished product before anyone sees it, if you like the smell of moss as much as the smell of ink, if you keep a basket of drafts that might someday sprout into something, bring them here. Send the pieces that sit in the seams. Share the small discoveries. Stay with the questions.

We’ll keep scraping together.

With curiosity,

Vedant & Toshali

Co-founders/editors, Khôra