Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Six
November- December 2025
The Space Between, A Poet’s Place
guest editorial by Randhir Khare.
When I was eleven, my environment and circumstances brutalized me. Poetry slipped me effortlessly into its forms and norms, faces and places, voices, moods, charades and unbelievable hope and love. I became a changeling. Like the secret life below a forest floor breeds its own amazing reality I did the same. Whether I was hungry or loveless or abused or abandoned, I dealt with experiences that came my way, they weren’t challenges for me.
Interestingly, I never gave a single thought as to how I had gotten down there in the first place. Was it via a tunnel while following a ‘rabbit experience’? Did I trip and topple in? True I was into experiences of all kinds but none of them as far as I know that could have ushered me into a new and unexpected world that has grown up around me with roots connecting across the world to the Bhilalas, Todas, Incas, Bantus, Australian Aborigines…the trail runs riot and I have long since lost the singularity of the scent.
But rather than abandon it I have held it close and it follows me where chance encounters take me…like a faithful dog without a leash.
I have had the good fortune of meeting others who carry worlds within and have been continually surprised by them. There was Loy, a friend of my youth, who lived with numerous selves long before I had got wind of them. He claimed that he had a lover who was a Polish trapeze artist and who had had a child by him. In the same breath he was the publisher of a small press who constantly wrote me acceptance letters for non-existent short story and poetry manuscripts, conducted an adventure festival to Mongolia with V.S.Naipaul, Bruce Chatwin and Gavin Young and finally got abducted by four men in black in a helicopter from the Vietnam War. Saw him a month later, subdued. He later actually published a volume of poems, ‘City of Blood’ and a novel, ‘Thorns of Hope’.
When I left Kolkata, Loy remained there only to be replaced by E…, the dope smoking and bhang eating poet from Mumbai. There were worlds within him – but he was a stingy guy and rarely shared his experiences or the fantastical geographies of his spaces. Of course, he brought reports from the frontiers of his deep imagination about which of our friends were in the running for the Nobel Prize for Literature and who was due to marry an Italian. Of course there were other sundry predictions shared in sign language. When he was stuck for a plausible explanation, he would start intoning esoteric Buddhist chants and often force me to learn some by heart. I wish I had seen him more often and known him better…and read some more of his amazing poetry. With time and circumstance, we drifted apart. He had a doped out buddy whose name I can’t remember. Couldn’t find him either. Pity. Maybe there was a gold mine there. Can’t go back. Times change. I haunted the little chai shops near the temple precinct by the sea with no luck.
Not long after, crawling with the years, I had the opportunity to meet Koda Sherry who was my colleague at work. Someone had picked him off the pavement chasing under a large raincoat in the rain. It took a while calming him down till he could live up to his role as a feature writer. Of course, he just about completed his assignments but in his spare time he actually started working on a novel based on his street experiences which was turning out to be stunning. I felt myself and my own writing pale into insignificance.
It was too good to be true till one day he returned to his ancestral home in Kerala then drank and smoked himself to death. His cot which was out under the palms was washed away to sea as his family watched him go.
A hollow farewell followed with everyone getting drunk and a fight ensuing after someone made out with someone else in the nearby bushes on the beach.
I remember feeling so sick that I vomited all the way to the local bus stand. Back at my apartment I thought of all those with forests beneath their feet. Some had slipped down rabbit tunnels and were lost forever. I believe the lost poems and stories are the best and all the others that have been laboured over and polished and made ‘mighty’ have amounted to mere rabbit holes which we are left to decipher.
And so the story makers and singers still keep coming but no one knows what’s within, the forest beneath the feet. What grows there? What blooms there?
In Bratislava, before the Velvet Revolution, I had a couple of encounters with a singer-song writer- musician Miroslav. During our first meeting in a downtown café he babbled about dollars he needed to buy recording equipment. Here’s my lead singer, he said, holding up a picture cut out of an old magazine. Tia. Her name is Tia. We were children together. We would gather flowers, she liked red flowers, poppies mainly. Slowly he slipped into the tunnel in the floor of the forest and took me with him to places where he had taken Tia…carried by his words. He had the endearingly soft voice of a serial killer.
The next time around, I saved him in the same café from being roughed up by the manager for trying to run off without paying his bill. I paid and he treated me to a haunting melody on his battered guitar. This is my life. It is flooded with melodies. Original melodies. They come and they go. None of them are willing to stay. Who wants to stay at a time like this, you tell me, tell me. Everywhere there are shadows, people without faces, homes are places, no one belongs, where are you now? He walked off into the dark.
I was afraid of bumping into him again. Of course I did. A couple of times. The last was when I gave him a couple of dollars and made a dash for, panting from lane to lane, the stink of the Danube in the air, shouting, I don’t want dollar anymore. In this country we now use stones.
If anyone had guts and money, I’d recommend investing in Miro. He was a winner. A one-man enterprise.
A pure poet, the real poet is not a destination but the journey there, ofttimes straying into woods of flowers on the way, falling into tunnels, coming out, turning up in decrepit small towns and festering cities with the same sense of celebration. Many of you would say ‘but nothing is complete and in some cases, doesn’t even exist, it’s still a figment of the mind’. Unfortunately, in the world we live in everything must be complete and gift-wrapped, have a name, have a label then it can be presented to the world.
Then how do we get to the real creations? If you are interested, through your senses, just being present wherever you are. Wholly present. Compassionate listening, looking, reading. My new role as an empathetic guide helps me understand each time a young adult talks to me about what they are creating. Poems, plays, stories. Most of what they are talking about doesn’t tangibly exist but it is present and I get a regular report on progress. It gives them courage and confidence.
Poets, more often than other creative spirits, occupy the space between. For long, I too lived there. It was meanderingly pleasant, joyous and engaging. It was another reality. When I was resurrected, it was like Lazarus rising from his tomb. Very reluctantly at first. From the safety of my space to the bright scrutiny of the world. How I long to return – to the tunnel, to the connectedness of consciousness, to the tomb where all belong.
But a seed once open never gets back to its oneness. I paid a price.
© Randhir Khare
Randhir Khare is a national and international award-winning poet, writer, artist and folklorist. He has thirty-nine books to his credit, performed his poetry in twelve concerts, exhibited his art in seven solo shows and has inspired the work of photographers, artists and actors, and has collaborated with A.R Rahman who has set his poems to music.
His work has over the years been published by Penguin Random House India, HarperCollins India, Niyogi Books, Sakal Publications, Silvercord Publishing, Rupa Books, River Books and a host of smaller presses.
As an educationist and arts practitioner for the last fifty years he has brought alive literature for eight to thirty-year-olds through dramatic readings and performances. His novels The Legend of Creaky and The Last Jungle on Earth were adapted on several occasions for the stage and used for creative workshops for The Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai and The Prithvi Theatre Summertime workshops. They have also been adopted by schools as rapid readers.
As storyteller, he has collected and performed numerous folktales which he has performed for various audiences and collected them in a video titled The World in a Story. More recently he has performed for video a series of his original stories and used them in schools as discussion points and art activities.
He is the recipient of the Sanskriti Award for Creative Writing, the Sahitya Akademi’s Residency Award, The Palash Award for Lifetime Achievement in Education and Culture, The Pegasus Gold Medal for Poetry awarded by the Union of Bulgarian Writers and a host of other prizes that recognise his contribution to literature and Education.
As director of The Rewachand Bhojwani Academy in Pune he has introduced a number of arts and literature programmes including the Library Alive project.
Two books, THE BOOK OF DAWN and TARA, THE DOG WHO ALWAYS WAS have just been released.
The Book of Dawn: Prayer-Poems
available at https://redriverpress.in/product/the-book-of-dawn-prayer-poems/