The Elders Go to the Forest

For fifteen years the Pandavas ruled, and the blind king Dhritarashtra and Gandhari and Kunti lived on in Hastinapura under Yudhishthira’s care, kept in honour by the men whose family Dhritarashtra’s son had tried to burn alive. The Ashramavasika Parva — the Book of the Hermitage Life — is about the dignity of knowing when to stop, and it belongs to the old, not the victors.

The honour was real and it was also, for the old king, unbearable in a particular way. Bhima, who had killed all hundred of Dhritarashtra’s sons, could not always keep the cruelty out of his voice; the blind king ate the bread of the family he had wronged and heard, sometimes, exactly what that bread cost. The epic does not make Bhima a villain for it or the king a mere victim; it lets the arrangement be what it honestly is — a kindness threaded with the unkillable memory of why it is needed. And one day Dhritarashtra decided he had taken enough of it, and asked Yudhishthira’s leave to do the thing the tradition kept for the end of a life: to go into the forest, lay down the world entirely, and prepare to die without a roof or a throne or a grievance.

Yudhishthira gave the leave with grief, and the old generation went — Dhritarashtra, Gandhari with her eyes still bound, Vidura, and Kunti, who chose the forest over her sons’ palace and, asked why, gave the parva its quiet devastating line: that she had borne her sons in hardship and had no wish to enjoy a prosperity she had not helped them earn, and would rather end her life serving the old and the blind than be served by the powerful. The mother of the Pandavas walked away from the empire her sons had won for her. The epic lets that be her last large act and does not explain it further, because it does not need to.

They lived in the forest as ascetics, and the Pandavas, missing them, went once to visit, and Vyasa — the composer, present at the hinges to the end — granted the grieving a single night’s grace: he called up, out of the river, the dead of the whole war for one evening, the fallen of both sides risen from the water to be seen and spoken to and let go again at dawn. It is the epic’s tenderest scene and its sternest, both: the dead are returned for a night precisely so that everyone learns, by having them and losing them again with the sunrise, that the dead are not coming back, and that the only thing to do with grief is to finish it.

Not long after, a forest fire — kindled, the parva says, from the elders’ own ritual fires left to spread — closed over the hermitage, and Dhritarashtra and Gandhari and Kunti did not flee it. They had come to the forest to end, and they let the fire be the ending, sitting still in it by choice as Madri had once climbed a pyre by choice in the Adi Parva, the story rhyming its first generation’s death with its last. Vidura had already gone before, in his own way, withering into death by yoga in the woods. The generation that had held the throne when this all began was now entirely ash, most of it by its own steady decision. The Pandavas were the eldest left alive. There was no one above them anymore, and the story, having removed everyone who came before, turned to remove them too.