The Game of Dice

The man waiting for Duryodhana at home was his uncle Shakuni, brother of Gandhari, who had come to Hastinapura with his sister and never left, and who carried his own buried grievance against the Bharatas. He listened to his nephew’s envy and humiliation and did not counsel war, which the Pandavas would win, but a game, which they could be made to lose. Shakuni was a master of the dice, and his dice, the story lets us understand, were not honest dice; they answered him.

Duryodhana went to his father with the proposal dressed as a courtesy: let the Pandavas be invited to Hastinapura for a friendly game of dice between cousins, as kinsmen do. Dhritarashtra hesitated, and asked Vidura, and Vidura told him plainly that the game would end the family — and the king, as ever, heard the true thing and did the fond thing, and let his son have what he wanted because refusing his son was the one act of which he was never capable. The invitation went out under the king’s name, and an invitation under the king’s name could not, by the law Yudhishthira lived by, be declined.

Yudhishthira came, knowing what dicing was and what Shakuni was, and sat down to play anyway, because he had been challenged and his code did not let him refuse a challenge. It is the hinge of the whole epic, and the story refuses to make it simple: the most righteous man in it walks open-eyed into ruin, not through wickedness but through a virtue — the keeping of form, the honouring of a summons, the inability to step back from a thing once entered — held past the point where it protects anyone. It is Bhishma’s flaw again, worn by a different man.

Shakuni threw for Duryodhana, and Shakuni did not lose. Yudhishthira staked jewels and lost them; staked gold, and lost it; staked his herds, his chariots, his slaves, his weapons, his lands, his city, and lost all of it, throw after throw, while the hall watched and Vidura begged him aloud to stop and was not heeded any more than Vidura was ever heeded. Something came over Yudhishthira that the story names as the gambler’s fever — the certainty, against every fall of the dice, that the next throw will turn it, which is the same illusion as Maya’s floor, the seeming taken for the substance, now wearing no jewels at all.

When the kingdom was gone he staked his brothers, one by one, and lost them into Duryodhana’s ownership. He staked himself, and lost. And then, with nothing of his own left to stake and the fever still on him, he was offered one more throw, and he put on the board the one thing that was not, by any law he believed in, his to wager: Draupadi. He staked his wife, and Shakuni threw, and said the word the hall had been dreading and Duryodhana had been waiting his whole life to hear — won.

The dice were still. Everything that the Pandavas had built on the wasteland, everything the Rajasuya had crowned, every free person among them including the woman none of them owned, now belonged, by the form Yudhishthira had honoured into the ground, to the cousin who had been laughed at in the hall of illusions. Duryodhana sent for her to be brought into the assembly, and the Sabha Parva, having spent three chapters showing how thin the floor was, broke through it.