Jon Anderson, who wrote the lyric, has given different accounts of what "Khatru" means. He has said that it means "winter," and also that it translates to "as you wish" in Yemenite Hebrew. "When we were working on it, I kept singing the word over and over again, even though I had no idea what it meant. I asked somebody to look it up for me, and when they told me the meaning, it worked for the song." The meaning of the song is more clear (I'm glad somebody thinks so. It's pretty abstract to me): Anderson is expressing how Siberians go through the same emotions that he does. They're people like us, just geographically distant. We may be from different places, but we're all basically the same. (Oh, OK, I would have missed that).

Jon Anderson is credited with writing the lyric to this song, with keyboard player Rick Wakeman, guitarist Steve Howe and Anderson credited for composing the music. The songwriting credits on Yes songs can be deceptive, since the full band was usually involved in some aspect of working up the song. Howe said that this song was one of their more collaborative efforts. "That song came together with the arranging skills of the band," he told Guitar World. "Jon had the rough idea of the song, and Chris [Squire], Bill [Bruford], Rick and me would collaborate on getting the riffs together."

Eddy Offord, who produced the album, remembers using a primitive studio technique to get a swirling sound in the mix: he had an assistant attach a microphone to a cable and swing it around the room to get a Doppler effect.