Cousins at Court

While Pandu had reigned and then renounced and then died in the forest, his blind elder brother Dhritarashtra had held the throne in Hastinapura, the crown finally his. He was married to Gandhari, princess of Gandhara, who had done a thing the story never lets the reader quite get over: learning, on her betrothal, that the husband chosen for her would never see, she had bound her own eyes with a folded cloth and never once removed it for the rest of her life, refusing herself a world her husband could not share. It was devotion and it was also a kind of self-blinding, and the epic means both.

Gandhari bore a hundred sons, the Kauravas. The birth of the eldest came with omens no one could honestly misread: jackals howling in the daylight, carrion birds wheeling and screaming, the sky wrong. Vidura and the learned counsellors went to the king and said the plain, unbearable thing — that this one child should be set aside for the survival of the house, that some sons are born to end families. Dhritarashtra could not do it. He loved the boy before he had met him, loved him the way he loved his own grievances, as a possession he would not surrender to anyone’s good sense. The child was named Duryodhana, hard to fight, hard to handle, and the warning sank without leaving a ripple, the way every true warning sinks in this court.

So the cousins were raised inside one palace: the hundred sons of the blind king, and the five sons of the dead one, brought in from the forest by Kunti and given a place. From the first day they did not mix. The Pandavas were faster, stronger, abler, and one of them in particular was a daily catastrophe at play — Bhima, with the strength of the wind in him, would shake ten Kaurava boys out of a tree like fruit, hold a knot of them under the river until they came up choking, eat the food of all of them and laugh at their faces. To children, this is not a game; it is humiliation administered without rest. In Duryodhana it stopped being a grievance and became a vocation.

He moved from torment to murder early and without much hesitation. He fed Bhima food laced with a poison strong enough to drop an elephant, and when Bhima sank into the dead sleep of it, had him bound and rolled into the deep water of the Ganga. Bhima sank past the world of men into the realm of the serpents below the river, and the serpents, for reasons the epic enjoys not fully explaining, chose not to kill him but to feed him a draught that left him with the strength of many elephants together. He climbed out of the river days later, alive and far stronger than before, while Duryodhana was still privately celebrating a death that had not happened. Nothing the prince attempted worked, and every failure taught him only the single lesson he was capable of learning: that he had not yet been thorough enough.

Vidura watched the whole of it and did what Vidura always did — said the true thing, quietly, exactly, into the king’s good ear. This will not stop of itself. It will grow until it cannot be contained. Dhritarashtra heard him, as he always heard him, and did nothing, as he always did, because in this king the faculty that hears and the faculty that acts had never been joined. The Mahabharata is patient on this point and never crude about it: its blindness is rarely only of the eyes, and its most ruinous men are seldom its most wicked ones — they are its weakest, its fondest, its most unwilling to do the hard right thing while it is still small.

The boys were princes in an iron age and needed more than nurses now; they needed masters of arms. First came Kripa, himself the son of a sage, who grounded them in the elements of weaponry. But the Bharatas wanted the greatest living teacher for what they believed were the greatest living students, and that teacher was at that moment walking toward Hastinapura, poor and slighted and carrying an old wound of his own — a private grievance that would pass, through these very boys, out of one man’s heart and into a war that consumed an age.