The Second Throw and the Road to Exile

The hall had frightened itself. Into the silence after the unending cloth came worse omens — jackals crying inside the palace, beasts and birds answering from the dark — and the blind king, who could not see them but could hear what they meant, finally moved, because fear could accomplish in him what justice never had. Dhritarashtra called Draupadi before him, praised her, named her the truest daughter of the house, and granted her boons to undo the afternoon. With the first she freed Yudhishthira from the bondage of the dice; with the second she freed his four brothers and their weapons. Offered a third, she refused it — a wife of the Bharatas, she said, might decently ask twice and no more — and the refusal, in that hall, was itself a kind of verdict on everyone who had asked nothing at all. The king, mending what he could, returned to the Pandavas their kingdom and sent them home to Indraprastha.

It should have ended there, and the story is careful to show that it was allowed not to. Duryodhana, watching his whole victory handed back across the floor, went straight to his father with the old argument sharpened: the Pandavas would not forgive this hall, Bhima had sworn in it, and to release them now was merely to choose the time and place of one’s own destruction later. He asked for one more game, on one changed condition — a single throw, and the losers to go into exile twelve years in the forest and a thirteenth in disguise, undiscovered; if they were recognised in that thirteenth year, the twelve and the thirteen would begin again. And Dhritarashtra, who had just been frightened into doing one right thing, was talked out of it within the hour, because his courage never outlasted the room it was found in. The summons went out again under the king’s name. Yudhishthira, again, could not by his code refuse a challenge from his elders, and came back, and sat down, and this is the detail the epic will not let him off: he had seen exactly how this ended once already, and he sat down anyway.

Shakuni threw once. The Pandavas lost once. By the changed terms there was no kingdom to lose this time and nothing to win back with boons — only the sentence: twelve years in the forest, a thirteenth lived hidden so well that not even Duryodhana’s searchers could name them, or the whole term renewed from its start.

They prepared to go, and the manner of their going was itself read by the hall and remembered. Yudhishthira left with his face covered, that his look might not burn those who had wronged him. Bhima went flexing the arms he had sworn with. Arjuna scattered sand as he walked, the arrows he would answer with. Sahadeva smeared his face, in shame for the house; Nakula covered his, that women not be struck by his beauty and grief; and Draupadi went behind them with her hair still unbound, weeping, so that thirteen years on the wives of the men in that hall would weep as she wept now. Vidura was charged with the care of Kunti, too old for the forest, and she stayed.

So the Pandavas went out of Hastinapura into exile, and the hall they left behind them had a shape now that it would keep until the war: the elders who had not spoken, the king who had moved only out of fear and only halfway, the cousin who had been given back everything and asked for the game again, and the woman whose two questions — whom did he lose first, and where was the law — the wisest assembly on earth had not been able to answer. The Book of the Assembly Hall ends here, and what it could not answer in a hall it will spend the rest of the epic answering in a field.