Pandu's Curse

Pandu was the best of the three brothers at everything by which an age of iron measured a king. He was crowned, and under him the Bharatas widened their borders and filled their treasuries; he campaigned in every direction and came home victorious, and for a while the dynasty looked secure in his hands. Bhishma arranged him two marriages: Kunti, princess of the Yadavas, adopted daughter of King Kuntibhoja, who carried a secret she had told no one; and Madri, princess of the Madra country, won in the manner of the time. Then, in the forest he loved to hunt, Pandu made one error that ended his reign and bent the whole story toward its war.

He loosed an arrow into what he took, through the leaves, for a pair of deer in their mating. They were not deer. They were the sage Kindama and his wife, who had taken that form for their love, and the sage, dying with the shaft in him and his joy turned to agony in a breath, cursed Pandu with a curse exact to the crime: the moment he touched a wife in desire, he too would die in that same instant, his pleasure becoming his death as the sage’s had. For an ordinary man it would have been grief. For a king whose single duty was to father the line, it was a sentence passed on the dynasty itself.

Pandu did not try to govern around it. He renounced the throne and gave it to his blind elder brother — and so Dhritarashtra, at last, received the crown that birth and blindness had withheld, a man finally given what he had spent his life resenting the lack of, a detail the story files away and returns to. Pandu took his two wives and went into the forest to live as an ascetic, stripping himself of kingship, ornament, and hope of heirs in a single gesture. But the dynasty still had no successor, and here Kunti’s long-kept secret turned from a private fear into the family’s deliverance.

As a girl, Kunti had served the difficult sage Durvasa with such untiring patience that he gave her, in reward, a mantra of extraordinary power: she could summon any god she named, and bear a son carrying that god’s nature. Young and disbelieving, she had once tried it idly upon Surya, the Sun. The Sun came, and would not be sent away unsatisfied once invoked, and she bore a son already wearing golden armour and earrings grown into his very flesh. Unmarried, frightened, a girl with a god’s child, she set the infant in a sealed basket on a river and watched the current carry him out of her life, and told no living soul. That child — she never learned where the water took him — was alive somewhere in the wide world, growing, and the epic, which forgets nothing, was keeping him for later.

Now, in the forest, with Pandu forbidden the marriage bed on pain of death, the mantra was no longer a wound but a gift, and Pandu, understanding what his wife held, blessed its use. Kunti called the gods in turn. By Dharma, the lord of righteousness himself, she bore Yudhishthira, who came into the world calm, exact, and constitutionally unable to tell a lie. By Vayu, the wind, she bore Bhima, vast in body and appetite and raw strength. By Indra, king of the gods, she bore Arjuna, of whom it was foretold at his birth that he would surpass every archer the world had carried or would carry. Then, at Pandu’s asking, she taught the mantra once to Madri, who called the twin Ashvins and bore the beautiful and able twins, Nakula and Sahadeva.

Five sons — the Pandavas — sons of Pandu by the law that mattered, sons of gods by the fact beneath it, raised barefoot among ascetics and deer and the recitation of scripture, ignorant for now of cities and cousins and the throne their father had set down.

Then the curse, patient as everything in this story is patient, kept its word. One soft spring day, with the forest in flower and his guard for once down, Pandu reached for Madri in the old longing he had governed for years, and died with the touch, exactly as the dying sage had promised. Madri, who had been the cause though not the fault, held herself wholly to blame; she climbed onto her husband’s pyre and would not be argued from it, and went into the fire with him. Kunti gathered the five boys — children who had lost a father and a mother within a single hour — and the forest sages led them down out of the hills and toward Hastinapura: toward a city that did not yet know these children existed, and toward a hundred cousins who, very soon, would wish with all their hearts that they never had.