The Forest Retreat

For fifteen years after the great war, the blind old king Dhritarashtra lived in Hastinapura as an honoured elder in the very house his sons had lost. Yudhishthira had given strict orders the moment the kingdom passed into his hands. The old king was to be served in all things as though Duryodhana and his hundred brothers were still alive and still ruled - the same soft beds, the same fragrant food, the same musicians at evening, the same hush of deference at every doorway. Whatever pleased Dhritarashtra was to be brought before any Pandava took his own share.

Yudhishthira would not sit until the old man was seated. Arjuna, Nakula, and Sahadeva attended him like sons. Draupadi and Subhadra waited on Gandhari as daughters wait on a mother. Kunti, the Pandavas' own mother, served the queen who had once been her rival in the women's quarters, and there was no rivalry left between them now, only two aging women bound by the same losses. Dhritarashtra was, in the words of the chroniclers, like a teacher dwelling among devoted disciples, wanting for nothing that a king could want.

Gandhari sat beside him as she always had, the blindfold still bound across her eyes - the cloth she had wound there on her wedding day, vowing never to see more of the world than her blind husband could see. She had kept that vow through a hundred sons and through their deaths, and she kept it still. Vidura, wisest of all the Kuru elders, read the scriptures aloud to the old couple at dawn and spoke to them of dharma and of the soul's long journey. Sanjaya, the charioteer to whom the sage Vyasa had once given divine sight so that he might narrate the whole war to his blind master, never left the king's side, anticipating his every need.

To any visitor the household seemed a model of peace. The man who had coveted the throne was cared for by the men who had won it, and not one of them let him feel the bitterness of his defeat. Yudhishthira meant it wholly. He had not the smallest wish to wound the old king; he carried his own guilt over the slaughter and longed only to atone by service. But under the calm surface of that house, one grief had never been laid to rest.

Only one of the Pandavas could not bury what he felt. Bhima had stood in the assembly hall and watched Duryodhana drag Draupadi by the hair while the old king sat silent and the hundred brothers laughed. He had hunted Dushasana across the battlefield and torn open his breast to keep a vow sworn in that hall. He had broken Duryodhana's thigh with a blow at the lake of Dvaipayana, ending the war and the dynasty in one stroke. Bhima bowed to Dhritarashtra in public, for Yudhishthira required it. But the great wolf-bellied warrior could not make his heart bow.

Dhritarashtra bore his sorrow with a dignity few suspected. He fasted in secret, lay on the bare ground at night, and let his body grow thin, assuring Yudhishthira every morning that all was well so that the kind king would not be troubled. But Bhima would not let the past lie buried. Within the old man's hearing, again and again, he slapped his own mighty arms and boasted to his companions of how he had crushed the sons of Dhritarashtra. He named them, one after another, and described how each had died beneath his mace, and how Dushasana's blood had tasted, and how Duryodhana had fallen at last.

The old king heard every word and said nothing. He understood that the bitterness was earned; he had brought it on his own house by years of weak indulgence, by closing his ears when Vidura warned him, by loving his cruel son more than justice. Yet a wound, however deserved, still bleeds. For thirteen years he had endured Bhima's voice. In the fourteenth and fifteenth year the boasts seemed to find their way into him as arrows find an unhealed gash, and something in the king quietly gave way.

He saw clearly at last what he had become. He had outlived his sons, his grandsons, his friends, and his fame. He was living on the charity and the patience of the very men who had emptied his world, eating bread he had not earned, sheltered by a kindness he could not repay. The thought grew in him through long sleepless nights until it hardened into a resolve, and the resolve gave him, for the first time in many years, a kind of peace.

One morning Dhritarashtra called Yudhishthira to him and took the king's hand in both of his own. "My son," he said, "you have served me as no defeated enemy has ever been served. You have given me your father's place in your heart, and your brothers have honoured me, and your wives have honoured Gandhari, and not one of you has reproached me with a single hard word. For all of that I have no thanks great enough."

Yudhishthira began to protest, but the old man pressed on. "I am very old. My hundred sons are ash. The kings who died in their cause are ash. I have leaned on you as an aged tree leans on a young one, and you have never bent. But it is the law of our house that a man whose time has passed should not cling to the comforts of the city. He should turn to the forest, put on bark and matted hair, and make his peace with the divine before the end. Grant me leave to go. Let me do penance for whatever part my blindness, my weakness, and my love for an unworthy son played in the ruin of the world. Let me die with my face turned toward heaven and not toward a throne that was never truly mine again."

Gandhari sat beside him, her blindfolded face turned toward her husband's voice, and she did not weep, for she had long since decided to share whatever path he chose. Yudhishthira wept instead. He held the old man for a long time and could not speak, for only now, at the moment of losing him, did he understand how wholly he had come to love this father he had inherited. He pleaded that the king stay, that nothing in the city be denied him, that he himself would do any penance the king required in his place.

But Dhritarashtra would not be moved, and Vidura, standing near, said softly that the king's wish was righteous and should not be opposed. A son may beg, Vidura said, but he must not chain a father to the world against his soul's need. Hearing the voice of the wisest man he knew, Yudhishthira bowed his head and gave his consent, though it cost him more than any battle had.

Before he laid down the last of his royal life, Dhritarashtra wished to honour the dead with his own hands. He asked Yudhishthira to open the treasury, and Yudhishthira opened it without measure, telling the old king that all of it was his and that he need not ask. On the sacred full-moon day in the month of Kartika the blind king performed the great shraddha rites for his slain sons and grandsons, for Bhishma and Drona and Karna, and for every king and warrior who had perished in the cause of his house.

In the names of the dead he gave away wealth beyond counting - gold and silver, herds of cattle, fine cloth, mountains of cooked food, jewels, beds, carriages, and dwellings - to the brahmanas, to the aged, to the blind and the lame, and to the poor of the city, until the chroniclers said the gifts seemed to have no end. He named each fallen son aloud as he gave, so that the merit might follow them wherever their spirits had gone. Yudhishthira stood beside him and added his own gifts, and the two of them, the conqueror and the conquered, mourned the same dead together.

When the rites were done the old king came before the assembled citizens of Hastinapura. He had ruled them, after a fashion, for the long years before the war, and many of them had lost sons of their own in the slaughter his house had brought about. He asked their forgiveness. He confessed that the catastrophe had grown from his own failures, his blindness of the eye and the heart alike, and his refusal to restrain Duryodhana when restraint might still have saved the world. He begged them to remember him kindly and to give their loyalty to Yudhishthira without reserve.

The people could not answer him. They stood with their voices choked and their eyes streaming, for whatever the king's failings, he was the last of the old order, the grandson of Vyasa's line, and to see him stripped to bark cloth and bound for the forest broke something in them. He blessed them, turned, and prepared to leave the city he would never see again.

On the morning of departure a thing happened that no one had foreseen. Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, the queen who had endured exile and disguise and the long agony of the war, declared that she too would go to the forest. She would not stay in the kingdom her sons had won. She would walk out of the gates with the blind king and the blindfolded queen and end her days in penance with them.

Her sons were stricken. Bhima, who had never in his life been at a loss before her, fell to pleading. "Mother, it was for you that we suffered the forest and the war," he said. "It was your command that bound us together. Now the kingdom is won, the throne is ours, and you would leave us to follow the parents of the men who wronged you? Stay and be the queen mother. Let us serve you as you deserve."

Kunti was unshaken, and her reasons came from the depth of a long life. She had lost too, she reminded them - she had lost Karna, whose secret she still carried, and Abhimanyu, and her five grandsons. She wished to spend what remained of her days in austerity, atoning and praying, not in the soft idleness of a palace. "I served Gandhari and her lord in their grief," she said, "and I will not abandon them now in their last journey. Do not weep for me. Win fame by righteous rule, as I have taught you. That is the only crown I want from my sons." She blessed them, embraced each of them in turn, and would not be persuaded.

So the old generation walked out of Hastinapura on foot in the cool of the dawn. Dhritarashtra went first, his hand on Gandhari's shoulder; Gandhari walked blindfolded with her hand on Kunti's shoulder; and Kunti, her face wet but her step firm, led them through the gate. Behind came Vidura, gaunt and silent, and Sanjaya at the king's heel. Draupadi, Subhadra, and the women of the palace followed them to the edge of the city, weeping like calves cut off from the herd, until the elders passed beyond the fields and the dust hid them from sight.

The elders crossed the Yamuna and came at last to the banks of the holy Ganga, to a hermitage among the ascetics where the air was loud with the chanting of sacred verses and the smoke of sacrificial fires drifted through the trees. There they put off forever the last comforts of kings. They bathed in the cold river at dawn, smeared their bodies with ash, wore deerskin and bark, slept on grass mats laid upon the bare earth, and gave their days to penance.

Dhritarashtra, who all his life had known only softness, embraced hardship with a fierce, joyful hunger, as though punishing the body could pay a debt the heart could not. His flesh dried to bone. His skin darkened. His hair grew long and matted with river clay. He kept fasts that would have killed a younger man, and he bore them in silence, his blind face turned toward the sun he could not see. The sages of the hermitage marvelled that a king bred in luxury could become so austere a tapasvin.

Gandhari kept pace with her husband in every austerity, asking no quarter, her blindfold unchanged. Kunti served them both, drawing their water, gathering their roots and fruit, easing the old king's body when the fasts left him faint, and joining the women ascetics in their devotions. The three of them, who had once filled great palaces with attendants, now lived on whatever the forest gave and on the recitation of holy names.

Greatest of all in his austerity was Vidura. Far advanced in the discipline of yoga, he ate nothing at all, then no longer even drank, living, the chroniclers say, on air and on the constant recollection of the divine. He wandered apart from the others, naked, his body wasting away to a thread, his eyes burning with an inward fire. He was, and had always been, Dharma itself walking the earth in a man's shape, born under a sage's curse to live a span as a mortal; and now, his term nearly spent, he was loosening the last of his ties to the body. Day by day there was less of Vidura to be seen, and more of the light that had always shone through him.

When more than a year had passed, Yudhishthira could no longer endure the separation. He longed to see the elders, and the citizens of Hastinapura longed with him, for they too grieved for the king and the mothers who had left them. So the whole court set out for the hermitage on the Ganga - the five brothers, Draupadi, Subhadra, the women of the household, and a great train of citizens behind them. When they reached the forest there was a reunion full of tears and joy among the river trees, the young king kneeling in the dust to touch the feet of the old.

But as the others embraced, Yudhishthira looked about for Vidura and could not find him. At last he glimpsed a figure deep among the trees and scarcely knew it for a man - emaciated almost past recognition, naked, smeared with dust, hair wild, the eyes alone alive and fixed upon some far thing. It was Vidura. Yudhishthira ran after him, calling, "Stop! Wait for me! It is I, Yudhishthira, who love you!" Vidura halted and leaned his wasted frame against a tree, and turned his burning gaze upon the king, but spoke no word.

And then, as Yudhishthira watched, a marvel took place that he would carry in wonder to the end of his days. Vidura's life-breath left his withered body and entered the king himself. The yogi gazed steadily into Yudhishthira's eyes, and through that gaze his strength, his breath, his very being flowed out limb into limb, sense into sense - for the two of them were one in their inmost essence. Both were Dharma, the lord of righteousness, who had taken birth in the world in two forms at once. Vidura had merely poured the lesser vessel into the greater.

When it was over the body still leaned against the tree, lifeless and at peace, while Yudhishthira stood trembling, filled with a power he had not had before. He moved at once to gather wood and perform the funeral rites, as a son should. But a voice spoke out of the empty sky, forbidding it. "This body must not be burned," the voice said. "He whom you call Vidura dwells now within you. He has reached the worlds of the righteous and needs no fire to carry him there." Yudhishthira bowed to the unseen speaker, understood, and was comforted, and he left the body to the forest and returned to tell the others what he had seen.

That evening the whole company sat together by the river, and for all the joy of reunion the air was heavy with an unhealed grief. Gandhari mourned her hundred sons, slain to the last. Kunti mourned in secret for a firstborn no one knew of and openly for the grandsons cut down. Subhadra wept for Abhimanyu, her boy torn apart in the wheel of armies before he had fully become a man. Draupadi could not be consoled at all, for her five sons had been butchered in their sleep on the last night of the war, and not even the death of their killers had filled the place where they had been. The women of Hastinapura wept for husbands and fathers and brothers without number.

Into this sorrow came Vyasa - the island-born sage, grandfather of the whole line, author of the great history that held all their lives within it, the one being present who had fathered the dynasty and outlived three generations of it. He had seen everything from the beginning and grieved less than any of them, for he saw the pattern whole. He looked on the weeping women and the blind king's bowed head, and he said that he would do for them what no other power on earth could do. He would let them say goodbye.

"Tell me your hearts," Vyasa said gently. "You grieve because the dead went from you in anger, in pride, in the heat of battle, with words unsaid and wounds open between you. Tonight I will lift that grief. Bathe in the river, perform the evening rites, and gather on the bank when darkness falls, and you shall look upon those you have lost, not as corpses on a field, but as they truly are now, free of all wounds and all hatred. Come without fear and come without weeping. This is a mercy granted once."

The family scarcely dared believe him, yet they obeyed. They bathed in the cold Ganga as the light failed, and as the stars came out they gathered along the dark water - the Pandavas, Draupadi, the widows, the blind king and the blindfolded queen and the mother who had given them up - and waited for whatever the sage's power would bring out of the night.

When full dark had fallen, Vyasa walked down into the Ganga until the holy water rose about him, and there in the current he called upon the dead by name. He summoned the warriors who had fallen at Kurukshetra, friend and foe alike, the whole slaughtered host of both armies, and he poured the merit of his lifelong austerity into the calling.

And the river answered. Out of the dark water, with a sound like a great host moving and a light like many lamps, the dead rose up. They came shining, clothed in radiant forms, free of every wound, free of dust and blood, free above all of the hatred that had set them against one another. Bhishma rose from the Ganga that had been his mother's own stream. Drona rose, and Karna the sun's son, and Duryodhana with his ninety-nine brothers about him, and Abhimanyu in the flower of his youth, and Ghatotkacha towering among them, and the five young sons of Draupadi, and Drupada and Virata and Jayadratha and the kings of a hundred lands. Enemies in life, they came now without enmity, calm and luminous and whole.

Then Vyasa, in his boundless compassion, gave the blind king the gift he had been denied his whole life long. For this one night Dhritarashtra received sight, and with his own eyes, for the first and only time, he beheld his hundred sons standing before him alive and shining. Gandhari looked too, lifting her blindfold by the sage's leave, and saw the children she had carried and lost. Kunti gazed on her grandsons. Draupadi ran to her five boys. Subhadra held Abhimanyu. The living and the dead embraced along the riverbank, and there was no anger anywhere, only love returned for a single night.

They spoke together until the stars began to pale. Old quarrels were forgiven; words long unsaid were said at last; the bitterness of the war was lifted from the hearts of the living and the peace of the dead was made plain to them. Then, as the first light touched the water, the warriors loosed the embraces of their kin, turned, and walked back down into the Ganga. The river closed over them shining, and they were gone, carried to the worlds they had earned. And those who had wished to follow their fallen husbands into the water were given leave by Vyasa to cast off their bodies on the bank and go with them to the same peace.

In the hush after the dead had returned to the river, with the peace of that vision still upon them, Kunti could no longer hold the secret that had weighed on her since before her marriage. She had carried it through every grief of her life, and the war it had silently shaped was now over and its dead had been seen and forgiven. So before her sons and the gathered family she spoke at last of Karna.

Karna, she told them, the great archer they had feared and hated all their lives, the warrior Arjuna had killed on the field of Kurukshetra, the friend for whom Duryodhana would have given his kingdom - Karna had been her own firstborn. As a young unmarried girl she had received from the sage Durvasa a mantra to summon any god, and in foolish wonder she had tried it on the sun. Surya had come, and a child had been born to her, splendid as his father, born already armoured and earringed. In terror and shame she had set the infant adrift on a river in a sealed basket, and a charioteer had drawn him from the water and raised him as his own. That castaway was Karna. The man the Pandavas had slain as their bitterest enemy was their eldest brother.

The Pandavas were thunderstruck. Arjuna, who had loosed the fatal arrow, was filled with a horror that words could not reach. Yudhishthira above all was shaken to his soul. He had ordered the war; he had wept over kinsmen slain; and now he learned that the noblest of their foes, the man they had wronged with their hatred, had shared their own blood and had hidden it out of loyalty to a friend.

In his anguish Yudhishthira laid a curse upon all women - that from that day no woman should ever be able to keep a secret. And he grieved for Karna as he had grieved for no one, vowing rites and offerings for the brother he had never owned in life. The knowledge entered him like a thorn that could not be drawn, and it stayed with him, the chroniclers say, to the very gates of heaven, where he would demand to know why so good a man had suffered so much.

The Pandavas returned to Hastinapura, comforted by the vision of the river, and took up again the weight of ruling. Two years passed in peace. Then one day the divine sage Narada appeared at Yudhishthira's court, and the king read sorrow in the sage's face before a single word was spoken.

Narada told them what the ascetics of the Ganga's banks had told him. The old king's penance had reached its end, but not as anyone had imagined. One day a great forest fire had broken out among the dry woods around the hermitage - a fire kindled, the sages believed, from Dhritarashtra's own sacred flames, the very fires he had tended for his worship. The blaze spread swiftly toward the place where the blind king and the two queens sat at their devotions.

Dhritarashtra did not flee. Blind, frail, and far advanced in penance, he had no wish to run from death, and he saw in the approaching fire the fitting end of his austerities. He sat down, fixed his mind wholly upon the divine, withdrew his senses from the world as the yogis do, and let the flames come. Gandhari sat at his right hand and Kunti at his left, and neither would leave him. The three of them, who had walked out of Hastinapura together, gave up their lives together in the fire, serene and unafraid, their thoughts on heaven and not on the burning. Only Sanjaya, on the king's last command, had risen and walked away northward toward the Himalayas, and after that day no one ever saw him again.

When Narada finished there was silence in the hall, and then a great cry. Yudhishthira raised his arms and wept aloud, and from the inner chambers the women took up the lament, and it spread through the whole city - for the mother who had borne the Pandavas had perished far from her sons, in a forest fire, after a lifetime of secrets and sacrifices, and they had not been there to save her or to say farewell.

Yudhishthira's grief was bitterest of all over the manner of his mother's death. "How could the mother of sons who can summon fire and wind and the king of the gods," he cried, "how could she die in a common forest fire, helpless, when her children had the strength of armies? What is the use of all our power, of this whole kingdom we waded through blood to win, if it could not keep one old woman from burning?" He reproached himself, and the fire, and the fate that had taken her so far from him.

It was Narada who lifted them out of despair, as the elders themselves would have wished. The sage reminded the Pandavas that the manner of a death is not its meaning. Dhritarashtra had not been caught and consumed against his will; he had chosen the fire as the seal of his penance, surrendering his life in perfect yoga with his mind on the supreme. By that choice, Narada said, the old king had attained the high worlds reserved for those who master themselves, the goal that ascetics labour lifetimes to reach. Gandhari, faithful to her husband to the last breath, had gone with him to that same peace. And Kunti, who had served the blind king and the blindfolded queen in their grief and shared their final journey, had won great merit and gone to a region of bliss befitting all she had borne and given.

"Do not grieve for them," Narada said. "They have passed beyond all sorrow. Grief from those they loved cannot help them now and may only trouble their peace. Offer them water, give in their names, and let them go in gladness, for they have reached the supreme refuge." Slowly the lament in the hall quieted as the sage's words took hold.

So the Pandavas went down to the river and offered the water rites for the three who had died in the fire, and for Vidura who had merged into the king, and for Sanjaya who had walked into the mountains. With those offerings the generation that had ruled before them - the blind king, the two queens, the wisest of counsellors, the faithful charioteer - passed wholly out of the world and into memory. Yudhishthira ruled on, more sober and more aged in spirit, knowing that the elders who had stood between him and the end were gone, and that the road from Hastinapura ran now toward his own last journey.