The Kingdom Divided

The news ran back to Hastinapura the way fire runs through dry season: the Pandavas live; they were not burned; they have won Draupadi, and Panchala stands behind them now, Drupada’s army at their backs and his alliance under them — and Krishna of the Yadavas, their cousin and a great deal more than a cousin, has come to stand at their side. What had been reported dead had returned as a power that could not be ignored.

In the blind king’s council the two old voices spoke their two old parts. Bhishma, Drona, and Vidura urged the just course: acknowledge the Pandavas, restore their father’s share, and let the divided house be made whole before the division hardened into something worse. Karna and Duryodhana urged the other course: they are strong now and will be stronger, so strike them while the striking is still possible. Dhritarashtra listened to both with the ears of a man who has already resolved to do nothing that requires courage, and chose the answer that merely postponed the reckoning — he would partition the kingdom and give the Pandavas a half.

They were given the lesser half: not the wealth and walls of Hastinapura but Khandavaprastha, a tract of scrub, old ash, and exhausted ground. Yudhishthira took it without a word of complaint, because that was the kind of king he was, and there, on that wasteland, the brothers — with Krishna’s counsel and the labour of many — raised a city so finished and so splendid that it earned a new name altogether: Indraprastha, a seat fit for the lord of the gods, with halls and water-gardens and ramparts that travellers crossed countries to see. For one sustained stretch the story simply lets them prosper, and it is worth noticing how rarely it allows that, and how briefly.

The sage Narada came visiting, and seeing five brothers share one wife foresaw the obvious fracture and gave them a rule to keep peace among themselves: Draupadi would keep house with each brother in turn for a fixed season, and during that season no other brother might intrude upon them; the one who broke the rule would accept exile as the penalty. Soon afterward Arjuna broke it himself — entering the room where Yudhishthira sat with Draupadi, but only to take up his weapons and ride to the rescue of a brahmin whose cattle thieves were driving off. He had done the unarguably right thing, and he accepted the penalty for it without protest anyway, because in this family the rule is honoured even when the rule is unjust to the man who kept faith. He went out on a long wandering exile, and on it, among other turns, married Krishna’s sister Subhadra, who would bear him a son named Abhimanyu — a boy the war was, even now, quietly waiting for.

Near the end of that wandering, resting one day by the Khandava forest with Krishna, Arjuna was approached by Agni, the god of fire, who came to them wasted and starving. Agni needed to consume that forest entire to be made well, and had been kept off it by the rains of Indra and by the creatures that sheltered in it under Indra’s protection. The two friends agreed to feed him. They ringed the woodland and held its edges with their bows while Agni burned it whole — its beasts and birds and serpents almost without exception — and the story does not look away from the scale of the killing or pretend it was clean. From the flames they spared only a few lives, and among them the architect of the demons, Maya, who, owing them his survival, offered to build the Pandavas a hall such as the world had not seen.

He built it, and it was a marvel of deliberate illusion: water that read as polished floor, floor that read as water, light that did not behave. And it was into that beautiful, double-natured hall that Duryodhana would shortly be invited as a guest — where he would misjudge water for floor and floor for water, and stumble, and be laughed at by people who should have known better than to laugh at him; and he would walk out of Maya’s hall having decided, with the whole of himself, that the laughter would be repaid, and that the price of it would be everything.

Here the Book of the Beginning closes, and the road bends, by way of a splendid hall and a careless laugh, toward the game of dice.