The Theft of Draupadi

Jayadratha, king of Sindhu, was married to Duryodhana’s only sister, Duhshala, and so counted himself half a Kaurava and wholly an enemy of the Pandavas. Passing the forest with his retinue while the five brothers were out hunting, he saw Draupadi alone at the hermitage and decided, on the strength of a king’s appetite and a brother-in-law’s spite, simply to take her.

He approached with courtesy first, and she met him with the bearing the story always gives her — she named her husbands, named what they were, told him plainly what he was walking toward. He took her anyway, forced her into his chariot, and fled. It is the dice game restaged in the open: a powerful man seizing her because the men responsible for her are, at the wrong moment, not there; and Draupadi, again, the one keeping her dignity intact while everyone around her loses theirs.

The brothers returned, read the wheel-ruts and the panic of the servants in a glance, and went after him at the speed of men with a standing oath to keep. They caught Jayadratha’s force and broke it. Bhima had him in his hands and meant to end him there, with the particular pleasure Bhima reserved for men who touched Draupadi — but Yudhishthira, and Draupadi herself, would not have a sister widowed for a fool’s crime, and the sentence was reduced from death to humiliation. Bhima shaved Jayadratha’s head to five tufts, made him declare himself the Pandavas’ slave before witnesses, and let him crawl away alive. It was mercy, and it was a mistake, and the epic knows the difference and waits. Jayadratha did not go home grateful. He went to the mountains, did penance to Shiva, and was granted a boon narrow and deadly: that for one single day he would be able to hold off all the Pandavas but Arjuna. One day. The story sets that day aside the way it sets aside Indra’s spear, and the war will find it.

Around this theft the forest book sets its great consolations, because the Pandavas needed steadying after being shown again how exposed they were. The sage Markandeya, ageless, told Yudhishthira the long view: of the ages turning, of dharma thinning as the world ages, of the deluge and the divine child who is the world’s seed riding the waters between one creation and the next. And the brahmin Brihadashva’s earlier lesson and these were of a piece: the Pandavas were being taught to see their disaster as one turn of a very large wheel, neither the first injustice nor the last, and to keep their conduct exact while the wheel did what wheels do.

The years were nearly spent now. Twelve of forest were behind them; the thirteenth, the hidden year, lay just ahead, and it was the one they feared most, because survival in it depended not on weapons but on not being seen. But before the disguise could be put on, the eldest of them had one more test to pass — alone, thirsty, at the edge of a still lake, with his four brothers lying dead around it and a voice in the water refusing to let him drink until he had answered what it asked.