The Thirteenth Year in Disguise

The thirteenth year had to be lived among people, not away from them — found in the open and yet unfound — and so it was the subtlest punishment of all. The Pandavas chose the court of Virata, the ageing king of Matsya, and went into it disguised as their own opposites, each hiding precisely the thing he was most known for.

Yudhishthira, the king, became Kanka, a brahmin courtier who entertained Virata at dice — the very game that had destroyed him now worn as a costume, and played, this time, by a man who had studied it until it could not touch him. Bhima, the strongest man alive, became Ballava, a cook, his terrible arms put to kneading and butchery, his violence allowed out only against beasts and, when no one was looking, the kitchen’s wrestlers. Arjuna, the first archer in the world, drew at last the curse Urvashi had laid on him in heaven and became Brihannala, a teacher of dance and song to the women’s quarters, neither man nor warrior, anklets where the bowstring’s calluses had been — the epic’s deepest disguise, the greatest fighter alive hidden inside the one shape no one would look for him in.

Nakula took the horses, Sahadeva the cattle, each becoming a keeper of the animals he had once owned. And Draupadi, who had been a queen and an empress’s equal, became Sairandhri, a servingwoman skilled in dressing hair and perfumes, attendant to Virata’s queen — she who had been dragged by the hair now earning her hidden bread by arranging another woman’s. The disguises are not random. Each is the person turned exactly inside out, and the year’s discipline is to live as the inverse of yourself without forgetting which one is true.

For a time it held. They served, and were unremarkable, and the months went by — and the strangeness of it is the point the parva is making. The men whose oaths and weapons the whole world feared spent a year being ordinary, and obedient, and small, and the story watches to see what that does to them. Bhima, in particular, was a held breath; his strength kept leaking out in the wrestling ring and being explained away as a cook’s brawling luck, and everyone near him could feel the year straining at its seams.

The danger of the hidden year was never discovery by Duryodhana’s spies, who searched and found nothing. The danger was that to stay hidden you must not act, and there are provocations a person of honour cannot let pass — and the court of Virata, calm on its surface, held exactly such a provocation in the person of the queen’s brother, a man named Kichaka, who was about to look at the servingwoman Sairandhri and set in motion the one thing that could undo all five disguises at once.