The House of Lac

In time the people of Hastinapura began to say aloud what had become plain to them: that Yudhishthira, eldest son of Pandu, measured and just and unhungry for himself, should be named heir to the throne. The old wound reopened precisely on schedule, in the next generation, in nearly the same shape. Duryodhana could not endure the talk. He went to his father with it, and Dhritarashtra — who loved his son the way he loved his own blindness, as a condition he would not be parted from — listened to him, and went on listening until listening became consent.

The plan that followed was made gently and by degrees, which is how the worst plans in this story are always made; no one ever quite says the whole of it in one breath. The Pandavas were invited, with every show of warmth, to a season’s festival in the pleasant river-town of Varanavata, and a fine new guest-residence was raised there against their visit. It was built by Purochana, a man in Duryodhana’s pay, out of lac and resin and seasoned timber and walls steeped in oil and clarified butter — a house constructed to be a fire, with the family asleep inside it, so arranged that the deaths would read as an accident of the night and no hand be visible in them.

Vidura knew. Vidura always knew, and was always disbelieved, and had long since learned to speak crookedly so that a warning could pass an enemy’s ear and reach only the one it was meant for. As the Pandavas set out, he said to Yudhishthira, in the language of the forest people that the others took for a courtesy, that the one who stays awake outlives both the fire and the toothed thing in the dark, that the jackal survives by digging his burrow many ways out, that what is made of lac will not stand against a flame. Yudhishthira understood him entirely. He went to Varanavata, admired the lovely lethal house aloud, settled his family into it as though he suspected nothing, and quietly engaged a miner — sent ahead by Vidura — to dig a long passage down out of the floor and away into the open ground beyond.

Then they waited, and this is the hard discipline of the chapter: they did not run. To flee would announce that they knew, and the hunt, once shown to have missed, would simply begin again somewhere they could not prepare. So they lived in the house of lac through the season, gracious and unhurried and watchful, and chose their own night rather than letting it be chosen for them.

On a festival evening a poor forest woman came to the house with her five grown sons, asking food and a place to sleep, and the Pandavas fed them and let them rest there. It is the heaviest passage of the early epic, and the story sets it down without softening it: the family that will found a dynasty surviving by allowing six strangers to lie down inside the trap in their place. Then Bhima fired the house himself, from within, so that the blaze would be laid to the night and the festival’s wine, and sealed Purochana inside it, and the six brothers and Kunti went down into the dark passage while the lac and oil roared up the walls behind them.

In the morning Varanavata mourned. Among the ash they found six bodies, a woman and five — the wrong woman, the wrong five — and the report carried back to Hastinapura that the Pandavas had burned in their beds. Duryodhana grieved in public with great correctness and rejoiced in private without any. Bhishma and Drona and Vidura grieved too; the first two truly, the third with the particular grief of a man who knows better and may not say so. The Pandavas were, officially, dead — and the dead, the story now shows, can travel where the living are hunted. They went on by night through the forest, disguised, eating what the land gave, five princes and a queen who no longer existed; and for the present, not existing was the only safe condition available to them.