The Hall of Illusions

Maya the demon-architect kept his word to the men who had spared him from the burning of Khandava. He surveyed the wasteland that the Pandavas had made splendid and raised at its heart an assembly hall — a sabha — of a kind the earth had not carried before.

It was a building made partly of illusion, and made so on purpose. Its floors of polished crystal lay so still and so clear that they read as sheets of standing water; its pools, set flush and motionless, read as floors. Light fell where no window admitted it. Lotuses of gem stood in tanks that seemed to be pavement, and pavement ran where the eye insisted there must be a pool, so that a visitor crossed the hall by trusting either his eyes or his footing, and could not trust both. It was beautiful past description, and it was, by its nature, a test of who could tell the seeming of a thing from the substance of it — a question the whole of the Sabha Parva is going to ask, in forms far less innocent than a floor.

Into this hall the Pandavas brought their kingship. Yudhishthira sat in it as a just king sits, surrounded by his brothers, by sages, by allied kings, and the report of the hall and the order beneath it travelled outward until Hastinapura heard, in detail, exactly how well the cousins it had tried to burn were now doing.

The sage Narada came to the hall, as he comes wherever the story needs a question asked aloud. He praised it, and then, in the manner of a teacher disguising an examination as a courtesy, he put to Yudhishthira a long sequence of questions on what a king owes — to his treasury and his spies, to his soldiers and their pay, to the old and the orphaned, to the farmer, to the law, to the truth, to the gods, to his own appetites. It reads as a catalogue, and it is in fact the standard against which everything Yudhishthira does for the rest of the epic will be silently measured, including the thing he is about to do that no catalogue of duties could defend.

Then Narada turned the talk toward ambition. A king of the Pandavas’ merit, he suggested, might fittingly perform the Rajasuya — the great imperial sacrifice by which a ruler is consecrated paramount over other kings. But he named its condition without softening it: the Rajasuya cannot be performed by a king who has a rival above him or an enemy unbowed. To reach for that height was to be required, first, to settle accounts with every power that would not bow — and there was one such power, vast and old and personal, that stood squarely in the way.

His name was Jarasandha, king of Magadha, and the path to Yudhishthira’s consecration ran straight through him. Krishna, who had come to the hall and heard all of it, did not pretend otherwise. The hall of illusions had shown the Pandavas the difference between the seeming of a thing and its substance. The Rajasuya now offered them the seeming of unrivalled empire. Its substance, Krishna said plainly, would have to be bought first — and the price had a man’s name on it.